Kevin Foster's Fighting Fictions (1999) used the Falklands/Malvinas conflict as a test case for exploring the ways in which mythologies are marshalled, shaped and exploited in order to justify war as part of a national project. Although principally devoted to an examination of how the activities of the British military and press corps were invested in (but did not, in the case of the latter, necessarily adhere to) ideas such as family and brotherhood, Foster also considered the nation-building efforts of Argentina's military junta, which (not unlike a similarly unpopular Margaret Thatcher) saw in its attempt to reclaim the Malvinas a last-ditch opportunity to garner popular support for its crumbling regime. Among the most interesting features of that part of Foster's study, for this reader, were the suggestive equivalences drawn between the experiences of the many conscripts to the Argentine army during the South Atlantic conflict and those of the political disappeared of the country's internecine ‘dirty war’. Such a comparison speaks not only to the consistent and indiscriminate nature of the military government's tactics but also more broadly to the hauntological character of history.

In Lost Worlds, Foster persists with the ideas of narrative and myth, inquiring into the role Latin America has played in attempts to negotiate empire and its aftermath by Britain, the United States and Australia. The book's title thus refers to the outcome of various threats to those countries' identities at different historical moments, as well as to what Foster calls the Latin American world, which is ‘sacrificed in the cause of defending or redeeming [them]’ (p. xvi). The author's aim, then, is to analyse ‘the buried realities of empire’ in Anglophone narratives about Latin America from before the Wars of Independence to the end of the twentieth century. The material covered is wide-ranging in geographical and historical scope as well as in form and content, encompassing poetry, fiction, memoir and travelogue. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a juncture of relative ignorance in Britain about the region, in which ‘signifying nothing, Latin America could be made to mean just about anything’ (p. 18), Foster reads Robert Southey's epic poem Madoc (1805) as a manifesto of British imperialism; Southey's later work A Tale of Paraguay (1825), thematising Jesuit attempts to settle the native inhabitants of that country, and R. B. Cunninghame Graham's A Vanished Arcadia (1901), based on journeys to the missions in the 1870s and 1880s, are seen as utopian exaltations of that monotheistic model of social and disciplinary organisation. Foster goes on to consider how in later adventure fiction – by Henry Rider Haggard (Heart of the World, 1894), Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World, 1912) and Joseph Conrad (Nostromo, 1904) – imaginary Latin American geographies served as a screen onto which Western concerns were projected, including the then perceived need to reconcile an atavistic but generative New World barbarism with the urbanity of civilisation in order to preserve imperial power. Following Britain's rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, however, by the mid-twentieth century, Latin America becomes a more malevolent site of death and debasement for W. H. Hudson, D. H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh, its perceived moral degeneracy affording a symbolic staging of the crisis of national identity. An interesting contrast here is the Australian attempt to build a utopian settlement – founded by William Lane, in fact, on conservative ideas about society and identity – in Paraguay. Thereafter, Foster returns to more familiar terrain with an examination of the role of Mexico in the post-war fiction of North American writers Jack Kerouac, James Ellroy and Cormac McCarthy. The one chapter that departs from this literary approach deals with another kind of narrative: the decline of English football in the 1950s and 1960s, a sport which constituted a different sort of locus for the articulation of the nation's struggle with its place in the post-war geopolitical landscape. Then, and notwithstanding the complexities of the game in its own national context, the spontaneous, even ‘surrealist’ style of Brazilian football and its star player Pelé were marshalled as utopian models to counterpoise the stagnation and insularity of both the home game and Britain's troubled self image.

For all the heterogeneity of its primary corpus, what emerges from Foster's lucid and engaging study is a singular, dismal theme: ‘Whatever the intricacies of South America, western culture can accommodate only a travestied version of it, a reductive simplification purposed principally to promote its relative sophistication or to compensate for its evident decline’ (p. 197). Lost Worlds is thus also an essentially one-sided affair: there is no space here, as there was in Fighting Fictions, to bring a sense of how Anglophone readers might, given the shortcomings of their cultures' engagement with the region, and to cite the book's concluding words, actually ‘get to know Latin America better’. Neither is there room for much nuance or colour in its undeviating trajectory. Foster's claim, for example, that British stereotypes about Latin America persist because they are emblematic of the nation's political unconscious is, of course, very valid, but it says little about how the same stereotypes function in the country of destination. Emerging work in tourism studies is beginning to illuminate the ways in which myths and stereotypes operate in complex, sometimes even productive ways. Similarly, Foster's reading of the possibilities offered by Latin America to writers of adventure fiction (as vehicles primarily to explore the moral and political implications of imperialism) depends on a rather static conception of adventure that does not entertain its historically heterodox possibilities across the continent, or what Zweig (1974) calls its dark, antisocial character.

Nevertheless, Lost Worlds is a readable and persuasive book which reminds us that, as Peter Hulme states in his essay ‘Beyond the Straits: Postcolonial Allegories of the Globe’ (2005), Britain ‘is deeply marked by its postcolonial condition, even as – and especially because – it has such difficulty recognising that condition’ (p. 54). The book is also timely. As the United Kingdom ekes its way out of recession and the European Union and IMF bail out a near-bankrupt Greece, the spectre of Argentina's economic collapse of 2001 looms. In a recent article on the global financial crisis, journalist (and writer of a travelogue of Peru, Inca Kola) Matthew Parris, in his exhortation to readers to ‘put down your saucepans and face the facts’, invoked the cacerolazos of Buenos Aires, the print article even including a library photograph of protesting porteños (The Times, 6 March 2010). A former Conservative MP, Parris enunciated one of the major policies of his party's manifesto in the 2010 elections: to make immediate and stringent public spending cuts so that Britain would avoid the humiliation meted out to its southern neighbours. What Foster calls the ‘fearful symmetry’ of Argentina was thus insinuated as a catastrophic paradigm for a nation faced with a massive budget deficit. The United Kingdom may be trying to address the consequences of its own loss of fiscal prudence at present, but the kind of imagining it does of Latin America, as outlined by Foster, clearly continues to be insistent.