The Politics Of Philology: Alfonso Reyes and the Invention of the Latin American Literary Tradition (Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory)

The Politics of Philology offers an insightful assessment of how the work of Alfonso Reyes helped to create the role of the writer as a public intellectual in Latin America. Robert T. Conn reconstructs Reyes's model of intellectual community, tracing its links to the various strands or the nineteenth-century tradition of philology, and arguing that Reyes was influential in forging a sense of unity among the Latin American writers of his generation based on their belonging to a common artistic circle, and on shared notions about the nature or art and its relation to society.