Literary Memoirs

Jos Victorino Lastarria was of the first rank of Chilean and Spanish-American intellectual and political figures of the nineteenth century. Statesman, novelist, scholar, activist, and a leading figure of Chile's Generation of 1842, a significant intellectual movement of the last century so named for the founding of the National University, he was at the center of all the intellectual struggles of his times. Recuerdos Literarios, or Literary Memoirs, opens a window on the nineteenth-century Chilean mind. At once a chronicle, a narrative, an analysis and critique of literature, and a deeply personal memoir, Literary Memoirs is one man's testament to the process of cultural nation-building. In its pages, which range from a detailed study of conditions that encouraged the launching of the Generation of 1842, to a record of the intellectual debates of mid-nineteenth-century Chile, readers have found the genesis of Chilean literature and historiography. For this new edition of Literary Memoirs, Frederick Nunn's introduction provides informative historical background, and R. Kelly Washbourne's translation preserves intact the essence of Lastarria's form and content.