ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses a wealth of football poetry and prose fiction published in South America since the early twentieth century. It also considers briefly the nature of the relationship between football and literature in Latin America. Latin American authors of the 1960s Boom, and of the post-Boom that is seen to begin from roughly 1970, have enjoyed high levels of critical study across Europe and the Americas. Much of which recognizes this literature's ability to harness features of popular culture and postmodernism, and considers the incorporation of elements such as cinema, music and even cookery. In 1989, before a marked increase in the publication of football literature in the region had begun to be noticed, Joseph Arbena identified in his Annotated Bibliography of Latin American Sport a total of 55 sports literature texts, including 19 novels and 18 works of poetry.
