Poetry and Revisionism: Notes on Authority and Restoration in Postwar Paraguay

Abstract

After the Triple Alliance War (1864–1870) most intellectual activity in Paraguay was dominated by conservative and liberal revisionist discourses in which the country’s prewar period was portrayed either as a social arcadia or as a brutal tyranny. This chapter focuses on early twentieth-century Paraguayan historical revisionism and the subsequent break with this intellectual tradition introduced by the work of poet Hérib Campos Cervera. Drawing on Hanna Arendt’s discussion on the notion of authority, Quin sustains that revisionist writers such as Celio Báez and Juan O’Leary express an anxiety over the waning of authority in the modern world which projects itself as an ideology of restoration. The author ultimately argues that Campos Cervera’s poetry inaugurates the exhaustion of the revisionist paradigm in postwar Paraguay.