The Politics Of Philology : Alfonso Reyes and the Invention of the Latin American Literary Tradition

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.

It reconstructs Reyes's model of intellectual community, tracing its links to the various strands of the nineteenth-century traditions of philology, and argues that Reyes was influential in forging a sense of unity among the Latin American writers of his generation.