Lost worlds : : Latin America and the imagining of empire / / Kevin Foster.

• VerfasserIn: Foster, Kevin, 1961-
• Place / Publishing House: London ;, New York : : Pluto,, [2009]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (280 p.)
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

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 1970's 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.

Table of Contents

Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Preface: Lost Worlds -- Introduction: The Half-Light -- 1. The News from Nowhere -- 2. Adventures and Anxieties -- 3. TheLast of England -- 4. South of the Border -- 5. Dreaming of Pele -- 6. Fearful Symmetry -- Conclusion: Southward Ho! -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.