Encounters Across Borders

The Changing Visions of Spanish Modernism, 1890-1930

Mary Lee Bretz

2001
608 pages
ISBN 0-8387-5484-8

Longstanding European visions of a fanatical and sinister or alternately exotic, culturally backward Spain lead to an exclusion of Spanish writers from early and recent studies of European modernism. Forces within Hispanic letters also obstruct an understanding of the nature and range of Hispanic modernism. Critical tradition seeks to differentiate and hierarchize Catalan and Castilian or Spanish and Latin American modernism. Francoist xenophobia and nostalgia for a Catholic, imperial Spain canonized interpretations of early twentieth-century Spanish culture as rigidly divided into two oppositional movements: a national, positively valued Generation of 1898 and a cosmopolitan, impugned modernismo. Efforts to construct impermeable borders between Castile and Catalonia, Spain and Latin America the Generation of 1898 and modernismo ignore renegotiations of relations between the various regions within Spain and between Spain and the former colonies during the period. To elide interconnections within the Hispanic world and between global and Hispanic modernism impedes a full understanding of the internationalist, transgressive features of modernism as it developed in Spain.

About the author:

Mary Lee Bretz is Professor of Spanish and former Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey. She received her doctorate in Spanish from the University of Maryland in 1973 and has taught at Rutgers University since 1974. Her research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature, literary and cultural theories as well as the intersection between theory and pedagogy. Previous publications include Voices, Silences and Echoes: A Theory of the Essay and the Critical Reception of Naturalism in Spain, Concha Espina, La evolución novelistic de Pío Baroja, numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature, and publications on the teaching of literature and culture, including the multi-volume text series Pasajes.