Jorge Luis Borges in Context

Situates the works of Borges within the contexts of family and culture, Argentine and world history, and reception and afterlife.

This book is for an academic readership in Latin American and world literatures. It offers unprecedented coverage of the principal contexts in which leading Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) read and wrote, including family and Argentine history, the Western cultural tradition, both learned and popular, and the Middle East.Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) is Argentina's most celebrated author. This volume brings together for the first time the numerous contexts in which he lived and worked; from the history of the Borges family and that of modern Argentina, through two world wars, to events including the Cuban Revolution, military dictatorship, and the Falklands War. Borges' distinctive responses to the Western tradition, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Kafka, and the European avant garde are explored, along with his appraisals of Sarmiento, gauchesque literature and other strands of the Argentine cultural tradition. Borges' polemical stance on Catholic integralism in early twentieth-century Argentina is accounted for, whilst chapters on Buddhism, Judaism and landmarks of Persian literature illustrate Borges's engagement with the East. Finally, his legacy is visible in the literatures of the Americas, in European countries such as Italy and Portugal, and in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, representing the Global South.