This book examines Argentine literary narratives from 1850 to 1880, including Amalia (1851) by Jose Marmol, Recuerdos de provincia (1850) by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Una excursion a los indios ranqueles (1870) by Lucio V. Mansilla, and Martin Fierro (1872, 1879) by Jose Hernandez, and the changing relationship between ideas of citizenship, the body, and national space. The author argues that the ideas embodied by the emblematic citizen are articulated in scenes about the relationship between the gendered body and concepts of nation-space--the lands or territories where struggles over national identity are represented. The works of Rosa Guerra and Eduarda Mansilla de Garcia, who do not have canonical status but were widely read in their time and dealt with the colonial-era myth of the "first" white women held captive by native Argentines, are also explored.