Inspired by Walter Benjamin's notion of constellation, this book draws on theories of Latin American modernity to investigate the Spanish literary Baroque and its repetitions as a historical-cultural predicament in Latin American colonial and modern texts. Inca Garcilaso, Borges, Carpentier, Rulfo, Darío and a range of Latin American "Post-Symbolist" poets (Agustini, Pizarnik, Sosa, Lienlaf and Huinao) are juxtaposed with the Lazarillo, the Quijote, Fuenteovejuna and Góngora's Soledades to produce original readings on topics of violence, rape, frustrated pilgrimage, and the truncated ambitions of colonized peoples and confessional minorities. In turn, Benjamin is juxtaposed with Mallarmé to recast the aesthetic dynamics of modernity in political terms, in order to understand the Baroque within a more broadly historicized concept of the avant-garde. Generous in scope, this book addresses the community of Spanish and Latin American criticism as well as emerging and pressing theoretical concerns within the field of comparative literature.

The continuing importance of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American culture.

Published in 1499 and centered on the figure of a bawd and witch, Fernando de Rojas' dark and disturbing Celestina was destined to become the most suppressed classic in Spanish literary history. Routinely ignored in Spanish letters, the book nonetheless echoes through contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature. This is the phenomenon that Celestina's Brood explores. Roberto González Echevarría, one of the most eminent and influential critics of Hispanic literature writing today, uses Rojas' text as his starting point to offer an exploration of modernity in the Hispanic literary tradition, and of the Baroque as an expression of the modern. His analysis of Celestina reveals the relentless probing of the limits of language and morality that mark the work as the beginning of literary modernity in Spanish, and the start of a tradition distinguished by a penchant for the excesses of the Baroque. González Echevarría pursues this tradition and its meaning through the works of major figures such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Nicolás Guillén, and Severo Sarduy, as well as through the works of lesser-known authors. By revealing continuities of the Baroque, Celestina's Brood cuts across conventional distinctions between Spanish and Latin American literary traditions to show their profound and previously unimagined affinity.

Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. Modernity in Spanish America has been viewed by a 'postmodern' cultural studies as a condition of the first half of the twentieth century whose major political, philosophical and cultural assumptions the region would do well to leave behind. This book explores a corpus of Spanish-American literary texts from that 'modern' period which dramatize the constitutive dynamics of modernity, in particular the legacy of the French Revolution, the logic of nationalism, the founding of the modern city, and the awkward relationship to both Western and indigenous traditions. Its argument is that one cannot so easily take leave of modernity.

Pablo Baler studies the ruptures and continuities linking the de-centered dynamics of the 17thcentury to the logic of instability that permeates 20th century visual and literary production in Latin America. Bringing philosophy, literary interpretation, art criticism, and a poetic approach to the history of ideas, Baler offers a new perspective from which to understand the uncanny phenomenon of baroque distortion. This interdisciplinary inquiry not only leads to a more specific formulation regarding the singularity of the reappropriations of the baroque in Spanish America, but also allows for a more comprehensive assessment of its historical reach in the broader context of the representational crisis of modernity.

This book offers a provocative interpretation of cultural discourse in Spanish America. Alonso argues that Spanish American cultural production constituted itself through commitment to what he calls the "narrative of futurity," that is, the uncompromising adoption of modernity. This commitment fueled a rhetorical crisis that followed the embracing of discourses regarded as "modern" in historical and economic circumstance that are themselves the negation of modernity. Through fresh readings of texts by Sarmiento, Mansilla, Quiroga, Vargos Llosa, Garcia Marquez, and others, Alonso tracks this textual dynamic in works from the nineteenth century to the present.

Analyses of early modern Latin American literature have often portrayed it either as a continuation of the Iberian tradition, or as a reaction against Spanish imperialism. However, such overgeneralisations cannot account for the complex corpus of writing produced in the 'New World'. This is particularly true for the study of Gongorism, the new style developed by the Spanish author Luis de Góngora (1561-1627), which transformed Baroque poetics on both sides of the Atlantic. In this monograph, Luis Castellví Laukamp examines Góngora's impact on the visual and artistic imagination of two major Spanish American authors: Hernando Domínguez Camargo (1606-1659) and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695). Its implications extend beyond the Hispanic world to inform broader discussions about poetic influence, transmission of culture, and the relationship between art and poetry. Luis Castellví Laukamp completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge and is now a Lecturer in Spanish Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester.