Ruben Dario And The Romantic Search For Unity

Modernism was the major Spanish American literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leader of that influential movement was Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan now recognized as one of the most important Hispanic poets of all time. Like the Romantics in England and the Symbolists on the Continent, Darío and other Modernists were strongly influenced by occultist thought. But, as the poet Octavio Paz has written, "academic criticism has ... preferred to close its eyes to the stream of occultism that runs throughout Darío's work. This silence damages our comprehension of his poetry." Cathy Login Jrade's groundbreaking study corrects this critical oversight. Her work clearly 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. After placing Modernism in a broad historical and literary perspective, Jrade examines the impact of esoteric beliefs upon Darío's view of the world and the role of poetry in it. Through detailed and insightful analyses of key poems, she explores the poet's quest for solutions to the nineteenth-century crisis of belief. The movement that Ruben Darío headed brought Hispanic poetry into the mainstream of the "modern tradition," with its sense of fragmentation and alienation and its hope for integration and reconciliation with nature. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity enriches our understanding of that movement and the work of its leading poet.

"Woman and the Infinite demonstrates how Pedro Salinas's poetry and frequently overlooked narrative and theater reveal a preoccupation with the nature of time, especially extraordinary moments that transcend space and time. Many of these moments are intimately connected with the man-woman, yo-tu relationship. Salinas's exploration of this theme is best understood in the context of other modern literary evocations of epiphanic moments. Such literary phenomena as William Wordsworth's "spots of time" and James Joyce's "epiphanies" are among the precursors of Salinas's moments of eternity, as are moments of timelessness in works by Marcel Proust and the French Symbolist poets. Salinas's reception of the Symbolists was direct, but also refracted through his reading of the Latin American modernistas, especially Ruben Dario. In his well-known commentary on Dario, Salinas connects the perception of woman with a visionary moment of extraordinary lucidity, a connection found in his own works." "Woman is elusive for Salinas. She has a multiplicity of forms and varying identities that are expressed with mirrors and shadows or Classical and Biblical mythological archetypes. All of these are found in "Aurora de verdad" from Vispera del gozo, a narrative piece which can be read as representative of Salinas's work as a whole. Specific images in the story, including mirrored figures and references to mythological goddesses, are also key elements in a trajectory in Salinas's works in general toward an all-encompassing, absolute, and infinite moment."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Re-evaluates Jose Marti's contribution to Latin America's literature and political evolution.

Diverse perspectives on the “chronicle”as a literary genre and socio-cultural practice.

"Aníbal González's book is a rich, exquisitely erudite, highly original, brilliantly argued essay about profound ethical issues in the history of writing literature in Spanish America. . . . It is the work of a consummate and recognized critic at the height of his powers."--César A. Salgado, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas at AustinWriting and violence have been inextricably linked in Spanish America from the Conquest onward. Spanish authorities used written edicts, laws, permits, regulations, logbooks, and account books to control indigenous peoples whose cultures were predominantly oral, giving rise to a mingled awe and mistrust of the power of the written word that persists in Spanish American culture to the present day. In this masterful study, Aníbal González traces and describes how Spanish American writers have reflected ethically in their works about writing's relation to violence and about their own relation to writing. Using an approach that owes much to the recent "turn to ethics" in deconstruction and to the works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, he examines selected short stories and novels by major Spanish American authors from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Manuel Zeno Gandía, Teresa de la Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar. He shows how these authors frequently display an attitude he calls "graphophobia," an intense awareness of the potential dangers of the written word.

Born in Nicaragua, Rubén Darío is known as the consummate leader of the Modernista movement, an esthetic trend that swept the Americas from Mexico to Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. Seeking a language and a style that would distinguish the newly emergent nations from the old imperial power of Spain, Darío’s writing offered a refreshingly new vision of the world—an artistic sensibility at once cosmopolitan and connected to the rhythms of nature. The first part of this collection presents Darío’s most significant poems in a bilingual format and organized thematically in the way Darío himself envisioned them. The second part is devoted to Darío’s prose, including short stories, fables, profiles, travel writing, reportage, opinion pieces, and letters. A sweeping biographical introduction by distinguished critic Ilan Stavans places Darío in historical and artistic context, not only in Latin America but in world literature. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.