José Victorino Lastarria was of the first rank of Chilean and Spanish-American intellectual and political figures of the nineteenth century. Statesman, novelist, scholar, activist, and a leading figure of Chile's Generation of 1842, a significant intellectual movement of the last century so named for the founding of the National University, he was at the center of all the intellectual struggles of his times. Recuerdos Literarios, or Literary Memoirs, opens a window on the nineteenth-century Chilean mind. At once a chronicle, a narrative, an analysis and critique of literature, and a deeply personal memoir, Literary Memoirs is one man's testament to the process of cultural nation-building. In its pages, which range from a detailed study of conditions that encouraged the launching of the Generation of 1842, to a record of the intellectual debates of mid-nineteenth-century Chile, readers have found the genesis of Chilean literature and historiography. For this new edition of Literary Memoirs, Frederick Nunn's introduction provides informative historical background, and R. Kelly Washbourne's translation preserves intact the essence of Lastarria's form and content.

Between 1980 and World War II, South America experienced the unsettling first stages of modernization. During this half-century of economic, political, and social change, the armies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru underwent a process of professionalization as European military missions transformed their officer corps into copies of French and German officialdom. In so doing, European officers inculcated their ideals and values, thought and self-perception--their professionalism--in countries historically vulnerable to militarism. Based mainly on a comprehensive examination of European and South American military literature, this study describes the significant contribution of European military professionalism to South American professional militarism. Nunn not only details the workings of the French missions in Brazil and Peru and the German missions in Argentina and Chile, but gives great emphasis to the themes and topics that most concerned the European mentors and their overseas disciples. He demonstrates convincingly that much of their professional literature was based on a yearning for an idealized past, discontent with an unsatisfactory present, and apprehension about a future that might threaten the most cherished of traditional officer-corps principles and aims. The study ends with World War II, yet is makes an important contribution to our understanding of South American history since 1940. The military organizations of the four countries considered here confronted what they perceived to be the major problems of their modernizing nations with solutions learned from their European teachers. Since 1940, they have resorted to "golpes de estado--"most notably the post-1964 institutional "golpes--"in order to impose forcibly some of those same solutions. Thus, despite increased U.S. influence, many of the programs implemented by military regimes in the latter half of this century bear the indelible stamp of "yesterday's soldiers."