Falklands-Malvinas: An Unfinished Business
by Bernard McGuirk

Date of Publication: 1 April 2007

This book analyses fiction, poetry, song, drama and film that deal directly with the Falklands-Malvinas conflict. In Argentina and in the United Kingdom, over the last quarter of a century, cultural historians and literary critics have occasionally addressed and sought to account for the impact of the 1982 war on the creative-imaginative and artistic output of their respective cultures. Habitually, they have done so in isolation or, at best, with cursory cross-referencing to "the other side". This study looks beyond national frontiers to consider not just the so-called Falklands-Malvinas factor in politics but the conflict's multiple effects in literature and the arts worldwide.

Whilst not overlooking the literatures of Argentina and Britain, indeed using them as a point of departure and of continuing reference, Bernard McGuirk has also explored the international resonance in literary and other creative representations of this last of the traditional wars, as the conflict has been dubbed. Whether from France, Italy, Brazil or the United States, for instance, or from deeply problematic spaces in-between, such as various Celtic and Anglo-Argentine perspectives, writers and artists have continued to draw on a complex and, ostensibly, still ill-comprehended war not only in terms of political history or failed diplomacy, of conflicting ideologies or the sheer waste of lives and national resources, but also of other more markedly symbolic investments and imaginaries.

The 25th anniversary of the conflict has produced a high degree of public interest in the topic and the audience will be not only specialists in war studies and war literature, in international cultural politics and in Latin America studies, but also all those intrigued by the ever topical legacy of the war itself and of its still resonant post-Galtieri and post-Thatcher effects. Here they will discover that a distinguished critic has explored a rich archive of creative works, on many of which virtually nothing has been written.