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Fernando Degiovanni's Los textos de la patria is an insightful study of two major collections of Argentine classics published in that country in the early twentieth century: la Biblioteca Argentina (1915–1928, edited by Ricardo Rojas) and La Cultura Argentina (1915–1925, edited by José Ingenieros). Both of these sought to promote competing versions of national identity through projects of canon formation. In his thoroughly-researched book, Degiovanni explores the relationship between these collections, their systematic efforts to impose a national canon, and the resulting, fascinating battle over a definition of "la argentinidad." Both Rojas and Ingenieros, as Degiovanni shows, undertook their respective nationalist projects through the conscious retro-active reconstruction of past Argentine texts as the tradition, as each would have it. As Degiovanni states in his introduction: "El abordaje de las series populares retrospectivas lleva a cuestionar las más asumidas certezas sobre el desarrollo y el alcance de las políticas culturales nacionalistas y promueve la revisión de las perspectivas de análisis utilizadas en el abordaje del proceso de canonización en Argentina" (15). In addition to the excellent historical, political, and cultural contextualization that Degiovanni provides, one of the most interesting ideas that emerges from his analysis is the role—or perhaps the end goal—of nationalism in both Rojas' and Ingenieros' projects, as the vastly different and in many ways opposing thinkers were explicitly concerned with the formation of future national subjects through their specific reformulation of past texts.

By bringing Ingenieros and his project into the picture, Degiovanni sheds new light on an otherwise fairly well-covered period. Inserting in his critical discussion a consideration of the very strategic program designed by Ingenieros, Degiovanni shows that: "una materialidad diferente y olvidada permite modificar sustancialmente la mirada dirigista . . . que ha dominado las explicaciones del período, dando lugar a la emergencia de un nuevo sistema de relaciones culturales en que ideas y objetos se cruzan y despliegan en un complejo campo de luchas" (17). Degiovanni's study of Ingenieros' La Cultura Argentina side-by-side with Rojas' la Biblioteca Argentina challenges the pre-established hypothesis that the period immediately following the Argentine Centenary (1910) is one of stabilization and consecration of a cultural nationalism based on a literary foundation closely linked to the policies of the State. The picture that emerges, instead, is one of a zigzagging series of conflicts enacted over the past—through the manipulation and presentation of texts, in a struggle to define the nation's tradition and canon—that serve to account for the ideological variations of Argentina's cultural nationalism (331).

In the nineteenth century, processes of canon formation—always closely [End Page 526] connected to conceptions of the nation and of national identity—were enacted primarily through the limited-edition publication of poetry anthologies organized by established men of letters. As Degiovanni correctly points out, the cultural construction and objectives of these are quite distant from those in our own moment in time, or even from those of the early twentieth century (25). In Chapter 1, "Un siglo de antologías: canon y nación de la Emancipación al Centenario," Degiovanni illustrates this contrast as he traces a series of anthologies from 1824 to 1910. The most interesting section of this chapter focuses on the Antología de poetas hispano-americanos (1892–1894) edited by Menéndez Pelayo, and its subsequent influence on the Argentine cultural landscape, primarily in the form of several strong reactions against the esteemed Spaniard's imperialistic view of the literature of and language in Spain's former colonies.

In Chapter 2, "Estado, inmigración y democracia: La Biblioteca Argentina de Ricardo Rojas," Degiovanni analyzes the development of Rojas' thought and ideology leading up to and including the period encompassed in the publication of la Biblioteca Argentina. Degiovanni studies which texts Rojas included in his collection, as well as Rojas' manipulation of these in the creation of a conservative nationalist tradition. Rojas...