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Argentinean literature is among the most important national literatures written in the Spanish language. World-famous Argentine writers include José Hernández, Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, Juan José Saer and Ernesto Sábato. Like other aspects of the Argentine culture, literature in Argentina has been subject to heavy European influence, especially from Spain and France.
Argentine literature began around 1550 with the work of Matías Rojas de Oquendo and Pedro González de Prado (from Santiago del Estero, the first important urban settlement in Argentina), who wrote prose and poetry. They were partly inspired by oral aboriginal poetry--in particular, according to Carlos Abregú Virreyra, by the lules, juríes, diaguitas and tonocotés. A symbiosis emerged between the aboriginal and Spanish traditions, creating a distinct literature, geographically limited (well into the 18th century) to the Argentine north and central regions, with the province of Córdoba as its center. Two names stand out from this period: Gaspar Juárez Baviano, and Antonia de la Paz y Figueroa, also known as "Beata Antula".
Gradually, with the economic prosperity of the port, the cultural axis moved eastward. The letters of the colonial age (Viceroyalty-neoclassicism, baroque and epic) grew under the protection of the independentist fervor: Vicente López y Planes, Pantaleón Rivarola and Esteban de Luca.
Cultural independence from Spain
Argentina's break with Spanish tradition, in favor of the French romanticism postulating the return to popular sources and to the medieval, allowed Esteban Echeverría to write the first local and realistic story, El Matadero ("The slaughterhouse"), as well as the poem La Cautiva ("The Captive"), with the Pampas as its stage.
In the middle of the 19th century, José Mármol published the first Argentine novel, Amalia. Poetry lessened in combative spirit and turned towards the anecdotal and sentimental: Carlos Guido y Spano and Ricardo Gutiérrez, the chronicle writers of folk literature; Vicente Fidel López, Lucio V. Mansilla and Juana Manuela Gorriti; and the historical ones: Bartolomé Mitre and Domingo F. Sarmiento.
Towards the end of the nineteenth Century, led by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, modernism appears in Latin American literature. Preciosity of manner and a strong influence from symbolism sum up the new genre, which inspires the clearest voice in poetry, Leopoldo Lugones, who was the author of the first Argentine science fiction story. The first truly modern generation in Argentine literature is the Martinfierristas (c. 1922). The movement contributes an intellectual doctrine in which a number of current trends come together: the trend represented by the Florida group, adscript to ultraísmo, with Oliverio Girondo, Jorge Luis Borges, Leopoldo Marechal and Macedonio Fernández; and the trend of Boedo, impressed by Russian realism, with Raúl González Tuñón, César Tiempo y Elías Catelnuovo. Ricardo Güiraldes, however, remains classical in style, giving a whole new freshness to gauchesca poetry and writing what is perhaps the novel, Don Segundo Sombra.
Benito Lynch (1885-1951), an eccentric short-story writer who, like Güiraldes, does not easily fit into any "generation", wrote his quirky tales in an enchanted new-gauchoesque manner about this time.
Between the end of this decade and the beginning of the following one emerged the Novísimos ("Newest"), a generation of poets (Arturo Cambours Ocampo, Carlos Carlino and José Portogalo), fiction writers (Arturo Cerretani, Roberto Arlt, Luis Maria Albamonte and Luis Horacio Velázquez) and playwrights (Roberto Valenti, Juan Oscar Ponferrada and Javier Villafañe). The group promoted philosophical reflection and a new essence for Argentinidad. Leopoldo Marechal's novel Adán Buenosayres, published in 1948 and praised by Julio Cortázar in 1949.
Also worthy of note is the literary work of Leonardo Castellani (1899-1981), a Jesuit priest who left a considerable bulk of essays, novels, tales and poetry. Expelled from the Company of Jesus, the outspoken Castellani was also widely ignored - like his contemporary Marechal - by the literary intelligentsia of his time due to his nationalist ideology.