Mariano Siskind's groundbreaking debut book redefines the scope of world literature, locating Latin America in the context of cosmopolitan imaginaries and mappings. In Siskind's formulation, world literature is a modernizing discursive strategy, a way in which Latin American culture has negotiated its aspirations to participate in global networks of cultural exchange, and an original tool to reorganize literary history. Reading across novels, poems, essays, travel narratives, and historical documents, Siskind shows how Latin American literary modernity was produced as a global relation, from the rise of planetary novels in the 1870s, to cosmopolitan modernism at the turn of the twentieth century, to the global spread of magical realism. With its unusual breadth of reference and a firm but unobtrusive grounding in philosophy, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, Cosmopolitan Desires will have a major impact in the fields of Latin American studies and comparative literature.
