This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.
Bringing together contributions from top specialists in Hispanic studies - both Peninsular and Latin American - this volume explores a variety of critical issues related to the historical, political, and ideological configuration of the field. Dealing with Hispanism in both Latin America and the United States, the book's multidisciplinary essays range from historical studies of the hegemonic status of Castillian language in Spain and America to the analysis of otherness and the uses of memory and oblivion in various nationalist discourses on both sides of the Atlantic.
First complete English translation of "Songs of Life and Hope "and "The Swan and Other Poetry " by Ruben Dario, one of the greatest poets to emerge from Latin America.
This 1998 book studies the ways in which nineteenth-century Spanish American writers and intellectuals imagined, described, and promoted idealized notions of a pan-Hispanic culture.
Modernismo (1880s-1920s) is considered one of the most groundbreaking literary movements in Hispanic history, as it transformed literature in Spanish to an extent not seen since the Renaissance. As Alejandro Mejias-Lopez demonstrates, however, modernismo was also groundbreaking in another, more radical way: it was the first time a postcolonial literature took over the literary field of the former European metropolis. Expanding Bourdieu's concepts of cultural field and symbolic capital beyond national boundaries, The Inverted Conquest shows how modernismo originated in Latin America and traveled to Spain, where it provoked a complete renovation of Spanish letters and contributed to a national identity crisis. In the process, described by Latin American writers as a reversal of colonial relations, modernismo wrested literary and cultural authority away from Spain, moving the cultural center of the Hispanic world to the Americas. Mejias-Lopez further reveals how Spanish American modernistas confronted the racial supremacist claims and homogenizing force of an Anglo-American modernity that defined the Hispanic as un-modern. Constructing a new Hispanic genealogy, modernistas wrote Spain as the birthplace of modernity and themselves as the true bearers of the modern spirit, moved by the pursuit of knowledge, cosmopolitanism, and cultural miscegenation, rather than technology, consumption, and scientific theories of racial purity. Bound by the intrinsic limits of neocolonial and postcolonial theories, scholarship has been unwilling or unable to explore modernismo's profound implications for our understanding of Western modernities.
Mariano Siskind’s groundbreaking debut book redefines the scope of world literature, particularly regarding the place of Latin America in its imaginaries and mappings. In Siskind’s formulation, world literature is a modernizing discursive strategy, a way in which cultures negotiate their aspirations to participate in global networks of cultural exchange, and an original tool to reorganize literary history. Working with novels, poems, essays, travel narratives, and historical documents, Siskind reads the way Latin American literary modernity was produced as a global relation, from the rise of planetary novels in the 1870s and the cosmopolitan imaginaries of modernism at the turn of the twentieth century, to the global spread of magical realism. With its unusual breadth of reference and firm but unobtrusive grounding in philosophy, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, Cosmopolitan Desires will have a major impact in the fields of Latin American studies and comparative literature.
In the decade between 1998-2008, Spain became the main destination for Ecuadorian migrants, and Madrid, Spain's capital, became the city with the largest Ecuadorian population outside of Ecuador. Through a combination of ethnographic research and cultural analysis, this book addresses the interconnections between spatial practices, cultural production, and definitions of citizenship in migration dynamics between Ecuador and Spain, showing how Ecuadorians are key actors in Madrid's recent urban history. Looking at the city as form and content, constitutive and constituting of ideological processes, each chapter analyzes the spatial practices of Madrid's Ecuadorian residents through various forms: the body, the home, public and leisure spaces, the city, the nation, and transnational circuits. Rather than addressing migrants as a general human type marked by (dis)placement, each chapter offers an illustration of how Ecuadorian migrants forge transnational processes through their everyday lives in specific time and place, and how these processes manifest culturally on both sides of the Atlantic.
Modernism, Ruben Darío, and the Poetics of Despair presents a detailed study of a neglected facet of Ruben Darío, and in general, of Hispanic Modernism: metaphysical and existential dimensions as preludes to Modernity. Alberto Acereda and J. Rigoberto Guevara approach the life and death issues in Darío works with special emphasis on his poetry. The authors demonstrate how the Nicaraguan poet takes the first steps towards poetic modernity. The tragic component of Darío works are examined in the light of Nineteenth Century philosophy, especially the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Various thematic proposals are also formulated for the study of the works of Ruben Darío.
