1926: Traditions Old and New

Abstract

During the 1920s, the praxis of literature was marked by an effervescent heterogeneity which reconfigured the Argentine literary field. Said heterogeneity can be identified in several thematic and formal innovations, but also in the various coexisting ways of being a writer, and in the proliferation of mass-scale or small-scale forms of disseminating literature which supplemented books and, in some cases, replaced them. Indeed, this was the decade in which Argentine literature reached modernity or, at least, a “modernidad periférica” (“pheripheral modernity”) (Sarlo 1988). It was a turning point during which “surgió una masa de lectores de libros de autores argentinos hasta entonces inexistente” (“a mass of readers of books by Argentine authors emerged, hitherto non-existent”) (Saítta 2011, 309). Of course, this process did not unfold autonomously. Rather, it is associated with contemporary political, economic, and social changes, such as mass immigration from Europe or the fact that large swaths of the population became eligible to vote in 1912.