Think of Latin America and what do you see? Escape? Adventure? Chaos? Oblivion? In Lost Worlds Kevin Foster explores how these and other stereotypes about the continent came into being and what their continuing currency tells us about ourselves. Foster argues that over the last 200 years Latin America has served the English speaking west as an imaginary realm where its highest hopes and deepest anxieties might be realised or assuaged. Examining a range of texts, from Southey's epics to Naipaul's essays, from Conan Doyle's gentlemen adventurers to Kerouac's restless hipsters, from the ruined Missions of Paraguay to the urban chaos of 1970s Argentina, this book examines the role that Latin America has played in British, US and Australian endeavours to resolve the key moral and political crises facing the English speaking west in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
| ISBN | 0745315089 | | Pages | 280 | | ISBN13 | 9780745315089
(What's this?) | | Volumes | 1 | | Publisher | Pluto Press | | Weight (grammes) | 340 | | Imprint | Pluto Press | | Published in | London | | Format | Paperback | | Height (mm) | 215 | | Publication date | 01 Sep 2009 | | Width (mm) | 135 | | DEWEY | 980 | | Spine width (mm) | 18 | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | | Academic level | Undergraduate, Postgraduate |
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Introduction.; 1. Gold Dust; 2. From Utopia to Jonestown; 3. Dancing in the Dark; 4. War, Democracy and Dictatorship; 5. Environmentalism andExploitation; 6. Narcopolis: Drugs, Crime and Politics; 7. Magic, Myth and Memory; Conclusion.
Lost Worlds is a lucidly written, illuminating account of how both an imagined and real Latin America has become a privileged symbolic site for working through the crises of national identity of Britain, the United States and Australia. This book sensitively explores how the lost worlds of Latin America have served to reimagine and refashion the lost worlds of the English-speaking west. -- Professor Noel Valis, Yale University In Lost Worlds, Kevin Foster provides a remarkable gift to postcolonial studies. The case could not be more thoroughly made for Latin America as fecund country for the generation of frank and compromising fantasies in British, American and Australian literature. -- Professor David Atwell, University of York
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