How did nineteenth-century Latin American novelists respond to moments when history itself seemed to come undone? Rather than treating dystopia as a futuristic genre, Palti traces its emergence from concrete political crises in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, as writers confronted national defeat, dictatorship, and revolutionary uncertainty. Reading Mexican fiction written after the U.S. occupation; Argentine texts produced under Juan Manuel de Rosas, including works by Esteban Echeverría, Domingo F. Sarmiento, and José Mármol; and Brazilian novels from the transition from Empire to Republic, with particular attention to Machado de Assis, the book shows how narrative form begins to falter. Plots stall, identities fragment, and stories resist closure. These breakdowns constitute early dystopian modes—atopia-atropia, heterotopia, and transtopia—through which literature registers the collapse of historical intelligibility. By locating dystopia in narrative form rather than theme, Palti offers a rich new account of literature under political catastrophe.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

ELÍAS J. PALTI is a consulting professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and formerly a full professor there and at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires. He is the author of more than 200 publications, including An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, Misplaced Ideas? Political-Intellectual History in Latin America, and Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change.

Preface: Literature and the Inrush of Temporality in Historical Thinking

Introduction: The Writing of Dystopia. In Between Fiction and History

Part I: Atopia, the Frozen Sheet (The Abject) (Mexico, c. 1850)

1.         The Spectral Afterlife

2.         Leviathan or Behemoth? The Impossibility of a “Total Ending”

3.         The Ludico‑Poetical Vision of History 

Part II: Heterotopia, the Dismal Hole (The Unspeakable) (Argentina, 1837-1852)

4.         The Assault on Reason 

5.         The Heterogeneous Political Entity

6.         Facundo as an Epiphorical Machine

Part III: Transtopia, the Depthless Deep (The Non-Subject) (Brazil, 1880-1910)

7.         The Transmutation of the Elements 

8.         Mimesis and Volatility at the Dawn of the Second Empire

9.         Redemption – Betrayal

Epilogue: The Chinese King, the Artist, and the Sense of a (Non-)Ending

Notes

Bibliography

Index