Argentine literature
As a matter of fact, the name of the country itself comes from a Latinism which first appeared in a literary source: Martin del Barco Centenera's epic poem La Argentina (1602).
The letters of the colonial age (Viceroyalty-neoclassicism, baroque and epic) grew under the protection of the independentist fervor: Vicente López y Planes, Pantaleón Rivarola and Esteban de Luca.
Argentina's true break with Spanish tradition was manifested in literature through the adoption of French romanticism as a model, postulating the return to popular sources and to the medieval.
This aesthetic and intellectual was brought by Esteban Echeverría who wrote the first local and realistic story, El Matadero ("The slaughterhouse"), as well as the nativist poem La Cautiva ("The Captive"), with the Pampas as its background.
[1] As Rosas' power increased, more literary works from the opposition were produced, such as Juan Bautista Alberdi's play El Gigante Amapolas, a good example of local sainete.
Poetry lessened in combative spirit and turned towards the anecdotal and sentimental: Carlos Guido y Spano and Ricardo Gutiérrez, the chronicle writers of folk literature.
Lucio V. Mansilla published in 1870 Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, a sort of chronicle of a voluntary expedition to sign a peace treaty with the Indians.
The (romantic) poetry as La cautiva or the latter Santos Vega by Rafael Obligado gave a lot of importance to the nature of the pampa,[2] sharing some elements with a picturesque, imitation-gaucho literature, purporting to use the language of the gauchos and to reflect their mentality.
Preciosity of manner and a strong influence from Symbolism sum up the new genre, which inspires the clearest voice in poetry, Leopoldo Lugones, who was the author of the first Argentine science fiction story.
Benito Lynch (1885–1951), an eccentric short-story writer who, like Güiraldes, does not easily fit into any "generation", wrote his quirky tales in an enchanted neo-gauchoesque manner about this time.
The Generation of 1937 centers on poetry, where it developed the descriptive, nostalgic and meditative in the work of Ricardo E. Molinari, Vicente Barbieri, Olga Orozco, León Benarós and Alfonso Sola Gonzáles.
Antonio Pagés Larraya, Emilio Carilla, Luis Soler Cañas are some of the few who stand out, although the greatest Argentine essayist after Sarmiento – Ezequiel Martínez Estrada – also belonged to the Generation of '37.
Two trends were in evidence: the tracing of metaphysical time and historicity (Horacio Salas, Alejandra Pizarnik, Ramón Plaza) and the examination of urban and social disarray: (Abelardo Castillo, Marta Lynch, Manuel Puig, Alicia Steinberg).
The epoch is characterised by the exile (Juan Gelman, Antonio Di Benedetto) or death (Roberto Santoro, Haroldo Conti, and Rodolfo Walsh) of major writers.
Some journalists (Rodolfo Walsh), poets (Agustín Tavitián and Antonio Aliberti), fiction writers (Osvaldo Soriano, Fernando Sorrentino), and essayists (Ricardo Herrera, María Rosa Lojo) stood out among the vicissitudes and renewed the field of ethical and aesthetic ideas.
Some examples are Alan Pauls, Guillermo Saccomanno, Mario Areca, Aníbal Cristobo, Ernesto de Sanctis, Marco Denevi, Edgar Brau, etc.
In the XXI century some of the more notable authors are writers like Claudia Piñero, Mariana Enriquez, Alberto Laiseca, César Aira and Hernán Casciari.
