Bøker av Cathy L. Jrade

Modernismo arose in Spanish American literature as a confrontation with and a response to modernizing forces that were transforming Spanish American society in the later nineteenth century. In this book, Cathy L . Jrade undertakes a full exploration of the modernista project and shows how it provided a foundation for trends and movements that have continued to shape literary production in Spanish America throughout the twentieth century. Jrade opens with a systematic consideration of the development of modernismo and then proceeds with detailed analyses of works--poetry, narrative, and essays--that typified and altered the movement's course. In this way, she situates the writing of key authors, such as Ruben Dario, Jose Marti, and Leopoldo Lugones, within the overall modernista project and traces modernismo's influence on subsequent generations of writers. Jrade's analysis reclaims the power of the visionary stance taken by these creative intellectuals. She firmly abolishes any lingering tendency to associate modernismo with affectation and effete elegance, revealing instead how the modernistas' new literary language expressed their profound political and epistemological concerns.

Delmira Agustini (18861914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her verse, especially her daring eroticism, her inventive appropriation of vampirism, and her morbid embrace of death and pain.No work until now, however, has shown how her poetry reflects a search for an alternative, feminized discourse, a discourse that engages in an imaginative dialogue with Rubn Daros recourse to literary paternity and undertakes an audacious rewriting of social, sexual, and poetic conventions.In the first major exploration of Agustinis life and work, Cathy L. Jrade examines her energizing appropriation and reinvention of modernista verse and the dynamics of her breakthrough poetics, a poetics that became a model for later women writers.

This study of Dario's poetry demonstrates that esoteric tradition is central to Modernism and that an understanding of this centrality clarifies both the nature of the movement and its relationship to earlier European literature.