Dirk Brunke

• This article concentrates on the Argentine author Esteban Echeverría who is known as the founding father of Romanticism in the River Plate region. The author of this article intends to show that the importance of Echeverría for the development of Argentine national literature goes beyond the spreading of Romanticist aesthetics. Especially his poem La cautiva (1837) has been regarded as the national epic poem of Argentina because it represents national landscape and the early days of national history. However, as the classification of thisThis article concentrates on the Argentine author Esteban Echeverría who is known as the founding father of Romanticism in the River Plate region. The author of this article intends to show that the importance of Echeverría for the development of Argentine national literature goes beyond the spreading of Romanticist aesthetics. Especially his poem La cautiva (1837) has been regarded as the national epic poem of Argentina because it represents national landscape and the early days of national history. However, as the classification of this narrative poem as the national epic poem already indicates, Echeverría also contributed to the presence of this prestigious genre at the River Plate region. By investigating Echeverría‘s less known verse texts – namely the texts which were read by all Romantics but which have been neglected by literary studies so far – this article illustrates that Echeverría gave decisive impulses for the presence of the epic poem at the River Plate.…