Abstract/Summary

This article explores two texts that offer a self-conscious, metafictional rewriting of Argentina’s founding revolution in May 1810 at the time of the nation’s Bicentenary. It aims to draw out the political focus of both texts (a novel by Washington Cucurto and a play by Manuel Santos Iñurrieta) by analysing the ways in which they draw on heavily politicized historical discourses in their fictional appropriations of this moment of origin. This analysis leads to the emergence of two very different ideas of the popular in both works, one closely related to Peronist discourse and the other entwined with the Marxist concept of the proletariat. This article therefore argues for the need to reconsider the definitions of the relationship between literature and history that emerge from postmodernist theory, definitions which centre on the epistemological relationship between ‘fiction’ and ‘fact’. Instead, it proposes a foregrounding of public discourses of history, often employed as political tools, in order to perceive a far more detailed engagement with the political in literary texts that rewrite history.