Modern Argentine Masculinities

Chapter 1

Imagining Male Subjects: Representing Argentine Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Poetry Anthologies

Marcos Campillo Fenoll

After the wars of independence that spread throughout Spanish America in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the various nation-building projects of the new republics were carried out by the male intellectuals of the time, the letrados.¹ As Ángel Rama establishes in The Lettered City, the discourses that dominated the public sphere were those of the letrados, who controlled what Rama calls ‘The city of Letters’ in the colonial period and ‘The city of Protocols’ during the nineteenth century onwards. From their masculine standpoint, these men led the struggle to institute political independence through the constant production of written documents. In the case of Argentina, Nicholas Shumway elaborates in The Invention of Argentina how a very limited number of men organized and led the national public sphere during the entirety of the nineteenth century.

Among the vast amount of written documents produced to record and organize the birth of the nation, poetry collections and anthologies played an important role by being edited and circulated as a social mechanism of representation. Editors of these anthologies were conscious that they had a dual purpose: on the one hand, they served to showcase the literary works arising from the new nations, thus supporting the political process of independence through the argument of an existing ‘national’ cultural production; on the other hand, they also served to familiarize the citizens of these new nations with a shared set of texts and values, and educate them about their new socio-political spheres. Hugo Achugar refers to these works as ‘foundational parnasos,’ emphatically affirming that ‘no aparecen casi textos de mujeres, y por supuesto no hay prácticamente registro de voces indígenas o negras. La nación es blanca y masculina’ [we can barely find in them any text written by women, and there is of course practically no presence of indigenous or black voices. The nation is white and masculine] (1997: 19).² Therefore, not only was the anthology a mirror of national manhood, but it was raced Caucasian as well. Indigenous, black and, additionally, female voices were obliterated for the most part, and any dissenting representation of a national masculinity that would challenge the hegemonic vision of the national male subject was made invisible. After all, nations are built upon the exclusion of certain groups of the population from exercising their legal rights.³

This chapter brings together a series of collections and anthologies of Argentinean poetry published between 1824 and 1914, written from both within Argentina and outside its borders, to analyze the ways in which editors of these works attempted to represent the Argentine ‘national masculinities’ of their time. By looking at this corpus of anthologies, we can observe how a dialogue emerges about the role of men at different stages of nineteenth-century Argentina, while witnessing the combination of word and image to instill in its readers a symbolic (as well as literal) ‘picture’ of the manhood/nationhood relationship through poetry. The chapter explores, therefore, how these national anthologies (liras, parnasos…) developed a conceptual representation of literary masculinities in the context of Argentine nationhood; that is, the ways in which they reproduced and articulated the literary project of a national masculine hegemony.

Collecting National Lyrical Production, 1824–1914

Throughout the nineteenth century and up until the Centennial celebrations of 1910, there was a continuing increase in publications of poetry anthologies in many Spanish American republics. Volumes such as La lira argentina of 1824, the first collection of Argentine poetry, served the purpose of showcasing the birth and development of national literatures, an American cultural production in opposition to the European (primarily Spanish) one. Clearly, these literary projects were aimed at buttressing and confirming an already-established independence in the political and administrative realms.⁴ Beatriz Gónzalez-Stephan’s literary historiography of Spanish America, Fundaciones: canon, historia y cultura nacional, illuminates the role that literature played within the new republics, as well as how the male voice maintained its hegemonic position since the initial stages of nation-building. According to Gónzalez-Stephan, the Argentinean writer Miguel Cané published a note in El Iniciador of Montevideo, during his exile in Uruguay, in which he established the need for the new republics to create ‘una literatura fuerte y varonil, como la política que las gobierna, y los brazos que las sostienen’ [a strong and virile literature, like the politics that govern them and the arms that support them] (2002: 189). This image—a triad of masculinity and nationhood represented by the male writer, the male politician and the military man—exemplifies for González-Stephan a synthesis of the foundational concept of literature in Spanish America:

‘La cúpula letrada vio las letras como un agenciamiento masculino (‘fuerte y varonil’) de la nacionalidad. La literatura que podía ‘retratar la individualidad de la nación’ estaría dada por la palabra de la razón (‘inteligencia’) masculina. La producción literaria era una cuestión de Estado, y el letrado un hombre político, que tenía por ‘sable’ las letras para inscribir el caos de la barbarie dentro del orden del discurso.’ (2002: 189)

[The educated elite saw literature as a masculine (‘strong and virile’) endeavor of nationhood. Literature that could ‘portray the nation’s individual character’ would be given by the word of masculine reason (‘intelligence’). Literary production was a State matter, and the letrado was a political man, who used his writings as his ‘saber’ to inscribe barbaric chaos within the order of discourse.]

In order for this masculine force of literature to be successful, it had to keep from the public eye, and therefore locked into obscurity and forgetfulness, those other forms that belonged to the ‘literature of beauty’; that is, the so-called female genres and forms (2002: 189–190). González-Stephan uses the reference to Cané’s conception of literature in the national project to support her study of the production of literary histories in Spanish America. Nevertheless, the same cultural ideal could be applied to the works that preceded them, namely poetry anthologies that began to be published right after the wars of independence and that constituted the first literary histories of the new republics.

The collections did not solely articulate the representations of the Argentine national male subject that dominated the public sphere, but rather challenged or questioned them at times. In a groundbreaking volume dedicated to representations of masculinities in nineteenth-century Spanish America, Entre hombres: Masculinidades del siglo XIX en América Latina, Ana Peluffo and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado warn the reader about the dangers of falling into the temptation of constructing a chronology in which the heroic masculinity of the solider during the wars of independence gives way to other models of masculinity throughout the century (2010: 13). According to Peluffo and Sánchez Prado, different discourses around masculinity circulated at the same time in juxtaposition. However, while editors of anthologies selected poems in order to offer readers a portrait of a hegemonic masculinity at the time of publication, there were also ambiguous and clashing discourses with regard to notions of masculinity in the national realm.

Only two critical works have partially analyzed this phenomenon of anthological production in the context of Argentina: Augusto Gónzalez Castro’s incomplete Panorama de las antologías argentinas (1966) and Fernando Degiovanni’s first chapter of Los textos de la patria (2007).⁵ While González Castro’s work is a posthumously published catalogue with some data related to publication dates and the authors, Degiovanni explores their significance in the context of canon formation by considering these anthologies precursors to two multi-volume prose collections that appeared in Buenos Aires in the 1910s: Ricardo Rojas’ La Biblioteca Argentina (1915–1928) and José Ingenieros’ La Cultura Argentina (1915–1925). Degiovanni’s work is quite exhaustive, but he does not explore those anthologies in detail.

In this chapter, I survey seven collections—some of which have not yet been studied. La lira argentina (1824) was the first collection of Argentinean poetry ever printed. Edited by Ramón Díaz in Argentina, it was published in 1824 in Paris and contained all the poetry that had appeared in the newspapers of Buenos Aires during the wars of independence. After this collection, many others were put together until the Centennial of 1910.⁶ While La lira argentina was edited in Buenos Aires and printed abroad, many others of these works surfaced outside the nation’s borders, such as Parnaso arjentino by Chilean José Domingo Cortés (1873)—important, as I will make the case, for its visual elements that provided a different view of Argentine masculinity. Other anthologies analyzed are Álbum poético argentino (1877), three anthologies put out by the Spanish publisher Maucci between 1903 and 1914, and Antología de poetas argentinos by Juan de la Cruz Puig (1910). Following a literary historiographical approach, this specific selection of works showcases certain types of hegemonic masculinities at different stages of the development of the nation. These representations of masculinities, when portrayed for a reading public that expected to see the best selections from the nation’s bards, served the purpose of instilling in the citizens of the new nation a model for behavior as active participants in the public arena.

La lira argentina (1824) and the Celebration of a Foundational American Masculinity

The publication of La lira argentina by Ramón Díaz is tied to a very specific national moment right after the wars of independence in Argentina, when the national male prototype was undoubtedly identified with the soldier who fought in the wars defending the ‘fatherland.’ As Robert W. Connell, Jeff Hearn and Michael S. Kimmel affirm, ‘[m]asculinities do not exist in social and cultural vacuums but rather are constructed within specific institutional settings’ (2005: 8), and this is clearly observed in this initial collection. La lira is not strictly an anthology, in the sense of selection using a given aesthetic concept, but rather is a compilation that attempts to collect all poetry published in Buenos Aires during the wars of independence. In it, more than a hundred compositions are included which praise and celebrate the national hegemonic masculinity represented by national heroes, such as soldiers and generals.

In opposition to the imagery of military heroes, one might consider that the roles of the poet and the editor himself—as men of letters instead of war—could, to some extent, challenge the hegemonic masculinity of the time. However, poetry had a very political function at the time, as it exhorted citizens to fight by glorifying heroes and national triumphs; poetry was therefore militant and politically committed (Barcia 1982: lxx–lxxi). Indeed, some of the poets featured in La lira had also been soldiers who had alternated between the pen and the sword (Vicente López, Juan Ramón Rojas and Esteban de Luca, for example). By associating the pen with the sword, the masculinity of the poet is equated with that of the soldier and no longer represents a challenge to hegemonic national masculinity. The masculinity that the soldier represents and that the poet celebrates is based, as the original editor of La lira himself notes in the foreword, on their ‘bravery and bellicose temper’ (Barcia 1982: 8). The first compositions that appear in La lira contain a particular symbology repeated throughout the entire collection: an emphasis on the strong masculine body suited for armed battle. In this way, while the ‘Marcha Patriótica’ by Vicente López opens the compilation because it had become the national anthem, it also served as a way to delineate the nation’s masculinity:

In this praise of national heroes, Argentine soldiers are characterized by their ‘bravery’ and ‘zeal,’ while they are at the same time physically (and visually) portrayed through their ‘strong chests’ and ‘robust arms.’ The masculine body symbolically becomes a rhetorical representation of the national body. As Michael Kimmel affirms, ‘cuando un sujeto masculino pone en escena su hombría, lo hace para impresionar a los pares y para distanciarse de los grupos que carecen de ella (las mujeres, los homosexuales, los niños)’ [when a male subject stages his manliness, he does so to impress his peers and to distance himself from those groups lacking this manliness (women, homosexuals and children)] (qtd. in Peluffo and Sánchez Prado 2010: 13). It is therefore worth considering against what other types of masculinity the editor of this collection is emphasizing the heroic masculinity of the soldiers.⁷

Due to the political and cultural aspirations of independence, in those years Argentine hegemonic masculinity was defined through its opposition to Iberian masculinity. By contrasting Argentine bravery with the Spaniards’ defeat, represented by the ‘haughty Iberian Lion’ (portrayed in the last verse of the first stanza as ‘lying at the feet’ of the new nation), the editor of this collection not only stresses a strong virile masculinity in opposition to the feminized defeated Spaniard, but also a kind of masculinity based on geographical positioning. The new independent Argentine masculinity takes the place of the old Spanish colonial masculinity. If we consider that anthologies ‘determine not simply who gets published or what gets read, but who reads and how’ (Price 2000: 3), La lira argentina functions as a mirror of masculinities located in the Americas, one in which both the editor and the poets in it shared with the readers of the collection the common trait of being Creole, American male subjects. The readers of this work might not have fought in the wars of independence and may not have shared the same bodily typology that this collection emphasizes, but they can nonetheless identify with these male bodies in the sense that they belong to the same ‘imagined community’ (to reference Benedict Anderson’s well-known concept) constituted by national male subjects in the Americas in opposition to the European—and more specifically Spanish—defeated and feminized male body.

(De)Constructions of National Masculinities from the Borders: José Domingo Cortés’ Parnaso arjentino (1873)

After the first period of instability and the defeat of Juan Manuel de Rosas in Caseros in 1852, Argentina started to thrive politically and culturally, and this also affected the ways in which works on Argentinean literature were published outside of the nation’s borders. Across the Andes, in Chile, the works of editor José Domingo Cortés (1839–1884) became extremely well-known in nineteenth-century Spanish America. Although his series of anthologies and biographical dictionaries provoked reactions ranging from admiration to accusations of blunt ignorance and criticism for a lack of judgment and poor editing skills, they remain largely unexplored with regard to the effect they had on the public, especially considering that they seemed to have had a vast audience and commercial success. Undoubtedly, his works can shed some light on how not only canon formation and literary historiography but also national masculinities were written from outside the national borders. Though Cortés published a total of nine anthologies in Chile and Paris between 1862 and 1875, four of those collections were part of a group of ‘national’ works: Parnaso boliviano (1869), Parnaso peruano (1871), Parnaso chileno (1871) and Parnaso arjentino (1873).⁸

Unlike previous collections and anthological projects in which Argentina was represented by an exclusivist and dominant masculine literary word, José Domingo Cortés opens up a new space in which masculinities are put forward in opposition to a female presence. Two aspects of Cortés’ Parnaso arjentino (1873) are new and unique to the context of collections of Argentinean poetry. First, unlike any other collection published in Argentina until this time, two female writers were included among a total of 37 poets: Ema A. Berdier (four poems) and Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta (five poems). However, the apparent openness to female writing crumbles when we realize that, while Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta was a young female poet who had gained national and international recognition, Ema A. Berdier is in reality the pseudonym of a fictional female poet invented by Argentine writer Bernabé Demaría.⁹ The second aspect that is new to collections of Argentine poetry is the inclusion of a photographic ‘medallion’ that visually portrays the poets, an element that Cortés had already used two years earlier in his Parnaso Peruano, and which other editors would later imitate at the turn of the century. This type of visual photographic representation in which a series of men is portrayed in medallion forms seems to have been fashionable at the time, as can be seen in a similar image, created in Buenos Aires in 1871, in which urban dwellers paid homage and showed their gratitude to the Popular Commission for its help during the yellow fever epidemic of that year (fig. 1).¹⁰ In both of Cortés’ medallions, created by illustrator and photographer Émile Garreau, the hegemony of the national poetic masculinities seem to be challenged by the presence of female subjects.¹¹ Although the portraits of nine female poets are located in the very center of the image in Parnaso peruano, displacing the males to the sides and surrounding them in the form of a beehive (fig. 2), in Parnaso arjentino, Cortés locates Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta at the top of the image, positioning all other male poets below her and inside the form of a giant lyre (fig. 3).

The visual element present in Parnaso arjentino, from the very prologue, is a central catalyzing axis in the anthology that acknowledges the existence of a corporeality in the observer/reader that is reflected as a mirror in the collection.¹² Cortés announces that ‘The Argentine nation must thank us for the mirror that we offer today for its literary glories, and that we consider a token of its progress’ [El pueblo argentino debe agradecernos el espejo que hoi le damos de sus glorias literarias, i que nosotros estimamos como un timbre de su progreso] (1873: viii). For the collection to function as a mirror, the Argentine (male) reader must act upon his agency not only as a reader, but also as an active subject who sees himself in front of this ‘mirror’ that acts as a reflection of his identity. The Parnaso becomes the nation because the (reading) nation can see itself reflected in this medallion as well.¹³ Nonetheless, the simultaneous representation of bodies belonging to different periods reveals the unreal nature of this medallion. Thus, as W.J.T. Mitchell notes, the image is powerful because it fools the observer by masking itself behind an appearance of immediacy and natural presence (2000: 43). This deception in the image’s naturalized immediacy is carried out in the medallion in the form of a family portrait, a form of photography popularized in the nineteenth century and reflecting the ideal of the nation as a large family growing in the new republics.

Figure 1: Portrait created in 1871 in Buenos Aires in recognition of the Popular Commission formed in order to help the city through the Yellow Fever Epidemic.

Figure 2: Medallion in J.D. Cortés’ Parnaso peruano (1871).

The medallion in Parnaso arjentino represents a big lyre, inside of which we can find the portraits of most of the poets included in the collection. At the top of the image we find a sun, a symbol used during the period of the illustration a century earlier to metaphorically represent the arrival of light (reason and knowledge), illuminating the literary nation. The position of Pelliza de Sagasta, the only woman in the image, is dominant in relation to the other writers, as she is located at the top of the image next to the sun, though separated from the rest of portraits. Her presence and position are not, however, exempt from ambiguity and contradiction. On the one hand, she seems to be the intermediary between the sun of reason and the rest of the poets, and her incorporation in the Parnaso seems to reflect the verification and recognition of the existence of a female poetry validated by the letrados. On the other, she is alone, alienated in a puzzle of masculine portraits; that is, Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta is tokenized.

Figure 3: Medallion in J.D. Cortés’ Parnaso arjentino (1873).

While at first glance the presence and position of Pelliza de Sagasta seems to attempt to disarm the imagery of the nation as a male-headed household or family, and while the male poets are potentially pictured as ‘sons’ under her rule (and therefore do not represent the hegemonic ‘strong and virile’ men who control the nation), in reality her presence serves to strengthen the masculinist essence of the nation and its hegemonic control of the cultural production. Irit Rogoff points out that sexual and racial identity in the field of vision is built upon processes of negative differentiation: ‘masculinity needs femininity or feminized masculinity to constitute its masculinity in agreed-upon normative modes’ (2002: 32). Moreover, Gillian Rose explains this utmost necessary dependency of masculinity on the existence of femininity by using the dichotomy established by Marilyn Frye in The Politics of Reality between ‘foreground’ and ‘background’:

I imagine phallocratic reality to be the space and figures and motion which constitute the foreground, and the constant repetitive uneventful activities of women to constitute and maintain the background against which this foreground plays. It is essential to the maintenance of the foreground reality that nothing within it refer in any way to anything in the background, and yet it depends absolutely upon the existence of the background. (qtd. in Rose 1993: 5)

Through Frye’s emphasis on the question of spaces, we can explain the presence of Josefina de Sagasta in Cortés’ work not as a menace to the masculine poetic body, but as evidence of the ‘existence of the background’ upon which this masculinity is built. Sagasta’s poems in the anthology, which picture the main roles assigned by the nation to women (such as the self-sacrificing woman in the domestic space waiting for her husband in ‘A mi esposo’), also help to confirm the dichotomy between the public and private spheres that perpetuates the family models imposed from within the ideological structures of the nation. In showing Sagasta by herself in the medallion and accompanied in the textual section by another female poet that is actually a false mirage (Bernabé Demaría’s creation of Ema A. Berdier), Cortés’ Parnaso arjentino corroborates that masculinities permeate and control all national representation attempts, even being disguised in unexpected spaces to deceive the editor and the reader.

A New National Masculinity: Álbum Poético Argentino (1877) and the Family Man

During the second half of the century, representations of male roles started to shift in relation to the symbolic image of the nation as a family. Shortly after Cortés published his Parnaso Argentino in Chile, an unusual collection was printed in Buenos Aires by the editors of the newspaper La Ondina del Plata that reflects these changes in the national sphere related to the roles that men and women would play in a more politically stable state in process of national organization: Álbum poético argentino.¹⁴ While this newspaper was edited by men, its articles were devoted to women’s fashion and style.¹⁵ The editors explained that the order of the poets in the compilation was alphabetical, and they ended with a note of thanks that clearly shows that the volume had a primarily female readership: ‘The editor would like to show his gratitude to the ladies and gentlemen subscribed’ (note that it was common to direct the editor’s words to merely ‘los señores suscriptores’ [the subscribed gentlemen]). Against common practice, there are no biographies of the thirty-two poets included, and it follows Cortés’ lead to include six female poets among the authors selected: Agustina Andrade, Santa Arenas, Silvia Fernández, Juliana Gauna, Juana Manso, Josefina Pelliza de Sagasta and Ida Edelvira Rodríguez.

The repeated themes of the poems in this collection show a radical change from the representation of manhood in La lira argentina of 1824. After the civil wars that followed independence and the dictatorial rule of Juan Manuel de Rosas, which led most intellectuals to flee to Uruguay and Chile, the nation experienced a new period of political stability and organization. This new political stability allowed for a more prominent role for women as mothers of the nation’s future politicians; simultaneously, men’s roles were redefined in the national project as husbands inside the family sphere. The shift is clearly visible in the first poem of the collection by Olegario V. Andrade, ‘La vuelta al hogar’ [The Return Home], in which the poet describes the return of the soldier who left to fight for independence as a metaphor of the nation’s maturity and evolution: ‘Hoy vuelve el niño hecho hombre’ [Today the child returns made a man], says the poet. Nicolas Granada’s poem ‘La madre mártir’ [The Martyr Mother] offers as well another vision of how the wars of independence disrupted and separated families. Granada’s portrayal of a mother describing in great detail how she raised and nurtured her son who had to leave for the war, only to receive the news about him falling in battle, is significant due to the lack of any mention of the father figure. While the news of his death are brought to the mother by a fellow soldier who survived the battle, the household (i.e., family) is left at the end of the poem without any representation of masculine characters.

Faced with this absence, the national family needs to be reconstructed and the role of the soldier gives way to another type of hegemonic masculinity: the sentimental and family man. In this version of masculinity, men are seen in the role of lover and husband, as well as the fatherly figure that can explicitly show his emotions and admiration for the nation’s women. Examples of this change include Antonio Balleto’s ‘Silvia,’ a poem about a girl who seems to be his daughter; Martin Coronado’s ‘La novia’ [The Bride]; Estanislao del Campo’s ‘Te adoro’ [I Love You]; Carlos Encina’s ‘El amor y la amistad’ [Love and Friendship], dedicated to his lover Florentina; Carlos Guido y Spano’s ‘A mi hija María del Pilar’ [To My Daughter María del Pilar]; Eduardo Ibarbalz’s ‘La reina del baile’ [The Queen of the Ball]; and Antonio Lamberti’s ‘La tocadora del arpa’ [The Harp’s Player], in which the poet describes a man moved to tears after listening to a woman playing the harp.

Conflicting National Narratives and Masculinities in Crisis: From Maucci’s Parnasos to the Antología de poetas argentinos by Juan de la Cruz Puig (1910)

Despite the fact that Cortés and La Ondina del Plata opened a space for female poetry in the national canon, thereby allowing a challenge to the previous hegemonic roles of manhood, at the turn of the century new anthologies returned to the all-male representation of the literary history of Argentina. By 1900, and around the time of the Centennial of 1910, the last hundred years of independence were being culturally redefined and a new historiographical vision of the nation emerged. In the new cultural and economic market, the Maucci editorial house targeted new masses of readers with a wide range of parnasos dedicated to the Spanish American republics, which were published and re-edited several times because of their low cost and marketing success.¹⁶ Maucci published a first edition of El Parnaso Argentino; Antología de poetas del Plata desde los tiempos coloniales hasta nuestros días in 1903, which was signed by ‘The editors.’ One year later, Argentinean writer and critic José León Pagano edited for Maucci El Parnaso Argentino, published in Barcelona. Ten years later, in 1914, Maucci decided to publish a second corrected edition of the first Parnaso from 1903. Similar to Cortés’ anthology of 1873, Maucci included in its editions of 1903 and 1914 one or more medallions. These medallions offer a glimpse into how masculinity shaped the vision of Argentine letters at the turn of the century from the other side of the Atlantic.¹⁷ In the span of ten years, the government of Argentina had also commissioned the production of an anthology in Buenos Aires that would become the national anthology of the Centennial: Juan de la Cruz Puig’s extensive Antología de Poetas Argentinos (1910) published in ten volumes. The proliferation of collections demonstrates the importance of national Argentine representations on both sides of the Atlantic around the turn of the century, a development undoubtedly shaped by the publication of Menéndez Pelayo’s Antología de poetas hispano-americanos in 1892.¹⁸ Issues pertaining to cultural genealogy and the role of national masculinity come into play in all of these anthologies, which contain different and at times competing agendas.

Maucci’s first edition of El Parnaso Argentino in 1903 is presented as a ‘complete book’ (4), and the ‘Juicio-Historia’ that precedes the poetical selection justifies the relationship between history and literature for a better understanding of the literary processes of the country. Needless to say, this historiographical account portrays a series of periods where Argentina is discovered, founded and developed by a series of men under the rule of different Spanish monarchs (whose names are used as titles for each section), achieving its independence through the fights of male soldiers. It also allows the reader to understand that, while men dominated the historical processes, representations of masculinity are not homogenous, and its multiplicity moves between conquistadors, clergy men, administrators, soldiers, politicians or poets. This multiplicity of masculinity roles is also represented in the selections of the anthology, therefore unifying history and literature under the celebration of a developing historical process dominated by masculine acts and writings. Therefore, El Parnaso Argentino includes exclusively male voices in its selection of 80 poets, in chronological order.¹⁹ The anthology is preceded by a medallion in which we can see seventeen of the poets inside an architectural structure, as if the anthologized nation represented a museum to foreign eyes (fig. 4). At the top of the medallion we can see Agustín Molina, Bishop of Tucumán, alongside Fray Cayetano José Rodríguez. The two religious figures allow the editors to trace a cultural historiography between these Argentine intellectuals and Spain through the role of Catholicism. Indeed, while in the first decades of the nineteenth century the new republics rejected their Spanish heritage and traced their origins to the native inhabitants and great empires of pre-Columbian times, by the turn of the century they were reconnecting their cultural heritage with Spain and colonial times.²⁰ José León Pagano’s Parnaso Argentino (1904) might have had a different audience in mind, a clearly Argentinean one, or possibly it was published as a response to the previous publication. A nationalistic perspective is made clear by the decision to insert as a prologue the brief piece ‘La poesía americana’ [American Poetry] by Juan María Gutiérrez, which places American poetry in context with three early epic works of the Americas, such as La Araucana, Bernardo and Cristiada, distancing himself from the imperialist view of the ‘Juicio-Historia’ [Historical Judgment] that appeared in the 1903 volume.

Figure 4: Medallion from the first edition of El Parnaso Argentino. Antología de poetas del Plata desde los tiempos coloniales hasta nuestros días (Maucci, 1903).

The most significant change, however, was not textual, but visual. Instead of reproducing the original medallion, the new edition included up to three different medallions corresponding to three distinct generations of writers. In the first, the sun is just rising in the horizon of the first generation of male poets (fig. 5). In the third, with the most contemporary poets, the sun is almost completely out (fig. 7). The chronological order of both the anthology and the visual representations, the ribbons with names printed on them from the first medallion, and the branches that connect the different poets in the second medallion (fig. 6) clearly recreate a metaphorical genealogy of the nation. However, unlike Cortés’ medallion some decades earlier, this genealogy is devoid of any woman writer. Instead, the nation reproduces itself through the masculine written word without the need of a female