This book consists of a collection of essays by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in their first English translation, and a critical introduction. The highly engaging essays explore the lives of seven transformational figures for Mexican feminism. This includes Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, and Nahui Olin, three outstanding artists of the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, and Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Pita Amor, forerunner writers and poets whose works laid a path for Mexican women writers in the later twentieth century. Poniatowska’s essays discuss their fervent activity, interactions with other prominent figures, details and intricacies about their specific works, their scandalous and irreverent activities to draw attention to their craft, and specific revelations about their lives. The extensive critical introduction surveys the early feminist movement and Mexican cultural history, explores how Mexico became a more closed society by the mid-twentieth century, and suggests further reading and films. This book will be of interest both to the general reader and to scholars interested in feminist/gender studies, Mexican literary and cultural studies, Latin American women writers, the cultural renaissance, translation, and film studies.
This delightful collection of essays by Elena Poniatowska presents readers with a wide panorama of important Mexican female artists and writers. Elizabeth Martínez's excellent translation brings Poniatowska's keen eye and searing observations beautifully into English, meaning that these extraordinary women, their lives, and their art emerge fully realized from the page. The book is a wonderful read for both those well-versed in Mexican literature and for those wanting to know more about Mexican art and culture! - Paul M. Worley and Melissa Birkhofer, Appalachian State University, North Carolina, translators of Word Mingas: Oralitegraphies and Mirrored Visions on Oralitures and Indigenous Contemporary Literatures by Miguel Rocha Vivas This book consists of a collection of essays by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in their first English translation, and a critical introduction. The highly engaging essays explore the lives of seven transformational figures for Mexican feminism. This includes Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, and Nahui Olin, three outstanding artists of the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, and Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Pita Amor, forerunner writers and poets whose works laid a path for Mexican women writers in the later twentieth century. Poniatowska's essays discuss their fervent activity, interactions with other prominent figures, details and intricacies about their specific works, their scandalous and irreverent activities to draw attention to their craft, and specific revelations about their lives. The extensive critical introduction surveys the early feminist movement and Mexican cultural history, explores how Mexico became a more closed society by the mid-twentieth century, and suggests further reading and films. This book will be of interest both to the general reader and to scholars interested in feminist/gender studies, Mexican literary and cultural studies, Latin American women writers, the cultural renaissance, translation, and film studies. Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez was Professor at DePaul University, USA, 2010 to 2020, and at Sonoma State University, USA, 1995 to 2010. Her recent books include Teaching Late Twentieth Century Mexicana and Chicana Writers (2021), Josefina Niggli, Mexican American Writer: A Critical Biography (2007), and Lilus Kikus and Other Stories by Elena Poniatowska, translation and introduction (2005). She was Editor of the academic journal Diálogo, an Interdisciplinary Studies journal from 2010 to 2020. Elena Poniatowska is one of the most powerful and important voices of Spanish American literature and journalism. Her chosen genre is literary journalism, much of which is collected in the 7 volume Todo México (1991-1999). Her prolific career has won her many awards including the Mazatlán Prize twice for Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1970) and Tinísima (1992), the Alfaguara Prize for La piel del cielo (2007), and the Cervantes Prize for Literature in 2013. .
Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) has been widely recognized since his own time as one of the most influential writers in the history of Western thought. His books were widely read by specialists and the general public, and his influence had been extended by almost continuous public debate over the past 150 years. New York University Press's new paperback edition makes it possible to review Darwin's public literary output as a whole, plus his scientific journal articles, his private notebooks, and his correspondence. This is complete edition contains all of Darwin's published books, featuring definitive texts recording original pagination with Darwin's indexes retained. The set also features a general introduction and index, and introductions to each volume.
Explores the imagery of woman in Mexican art and visual culture. Examines how woman signified a variety of concepts, from modernity to authenticity and revolutionary social transformation, both before and after the Mexican Revolution.
In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, Stridentism (estridentismo) burst on the scene in the 1920s as an avant-garde challenge to political and intellectual complacency. Led by poets Manuel Maples Arce, Germ n List Arzubide, and Salvador Gallardo, prose writer Arqueles Vela, painters Ferm n Revueltas, Ram n Alva de la Canal, Leopoldo M ndez, and Jean Charlot, and sculptor Germ n Cueto, the Stridentists rejected academic conservatism, celebrated modernity and technological novelties such as the radio, cinema and the airplane, and sought to transform not only written and visual language but also everyday life through the creation of new aesthetic spaces and new approaches to the urban environment. From 1921 to 1927, they issued manifestos, published magazines and books, organized performances, and served as a critical force in Mexican art and literature that was known and admired in intellectual circles throughout the Americas. Initially active in Mexico City and Puebla, Stridentism reached its peak in Xalapa, Veracruz, where its members collaborated with the state government to the extent that critics accused them of "stridentizing" the state. By 1928 the movement had dispersed, but its iconoclastic spirit lived on in other forms, merging into and influencing other movements of the 1930s and beyond. This book is a history of Stridentism as a multifaceted cultural movement deeply imbued with the spirit of 1920s Mexico. Bringing together original interdisciplinary research and critical analysis, it explores the ways in which the Stridentists pushed the limits of the collective imagination in an era of conflict and change.
Winner, Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Modern Language Association, 2010 The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture tracks the three spectacular forces of New World literary culture—cities, festivals, and wonder—from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, from the Old World to the New, and from Mexico to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. It treats a multitude of imperialist and anti-imperialist texts in depth, including poetry, drama, protofiction, historiography, and journalism. While several of the landmark authors studied, including Hernán Cortés and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, are familiar, others have received remarkably little critical attention. Similarly, in spotlighting creole writers, Merrim reveals an intertextual tradition in Mexico that spans two centuries. Because the spectacular city reaches its peak in the seventeenth century, Merrim's book also theorizes and details the spirited work of the New World Baroque. The result is the rich examination of a trajectory that leads from the Renaissance ordered city to the energetic revolts of the spectacular city and the New World Baroque.
This book crosses multiple world cultures as the chapters highlight both women as creators (by) and women as subjects (about). Chapter topics address widely varying socio-cultural facets of multi-cultures from various historical, sociological, artistic and literary perspectives. The title, Women as Creators and Subjects, in that order, summarizes the content of the book, which begins with commentary on women as creators and moves to elucidating about women to establish a framework. Themes range from power and politics in regards to Aztec women’s bodies, roles of historical indigenous, Spanish, Latin America, and Latinx women, and female participation in development efforts in the Global South of studio art, i.e., visual representations of women by women, as well as of female muses for male artists—and critical articles about all manner of works and genres literally by a litany of women artists and writers, both in literature and film, as well as women as represented in works by males, all from across the Middle East, Global South, Europe and the Americas.
Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together, chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals, some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians. Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting took place between the two camps as they sparred over the production of generally accepted notions and representations of the revolution's legacy—and what it meant to be authentically Mexican.
