Kevin Foster 
Lost Worlds [PDF ebook] 
Latin America and the Imagining of Empire

Think of Latin America and what do you see? Escape? Adventure? Chaos? Oblivion? Lost Worlds explores how these stereotypes came into being and what they tells us about ourselves.



Examining a range of texts, from Southey’s epics to Naipaul’s essays, from Conan Doyle’s gentlemen adventurers to Kerouac’s restless hipsters, this book reveals the role that Latin America has played in British, US and Australian endeavours in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.



Over the last 200 years, Latin America has served the West as an imaginary realm where its highest hopes and deepest anxieties might be realised.

Table of Content

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface Lost Worlds

Introduction The Half-Light

1. News From Nowhere

2. Adventures and Anxieties

3. The Last of England

4. South of the Border

5. Dreaming of Pelé

6. Fearful Symmetry

Conclusion Southward Ho!

Notes

Works Cited

Index

About the author

Kevin Foster teaches in the School of English, Communication and Performance Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of Lost Worlds (Pluto, 2009).