| Abstract: | This article explores the dystopian presence of Buenos Aires in Roberto Arlt's Los siete locos (The seven madmen) and its companion novel, Los lanzallamas (The flamethrowers). Both belong to a tradition of metropolitan narrative represented in Europe by authors such as Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin and James Joyce. Arlt's work, however, has a distinctive character, since it connects the expectations and anxieties unleashed by modernity with a dystopian imagination which has origins in nineteenth-century Argentina with its raison d'être being profoundly linked to the formation of an Argentine national identity. |
