This book explores the ways in which Latin American poets, novelists, journalists, public intellectuals, and a vast number of unknown soldier-memorialists produced aesthetic and political discourses on World War I as a Latin American literary event. Siskind presents a unified Latin American corpus that sheds light on the possibility of understanding World War I not just as a European affair, but also as a privileged symbolic horizon against which some of the most important Latin American writers of that period worked through collective and individual anxieties. This corpus sheds light on the interwoven meaning of the nation, modernity, cosmopolitan ethical demands, and the globalization of mass violence. The book interrogates wars (and world wars in particular) as they break down and rearrange the spatial meaning of particular world mappings, and how Latin American writers anxious about their place in the universalized order of modernity might have perceived these shifts as an opportunity to negotiate symbolic re-inscriptions of their political and aesthetic horizon.
Looking at texts on ruins and trenches, on spies and politics, on everyday life and affective engagements with the traumatic core of the war, this book unveils a historical and literary archive that reconceptualizes and expands the globality of World War I, inscribing Latin American writers in its discursive making. It proposes productive dialogues and polemics with the fields of British, French, and German war literature (whether modernist, moralist, or sentimental), as well as with the emerging critical discourses of postcolonial war literature and global modernisms.