Overview

Las Raras proposes that the Modernistas’ advocacy for a writing style they considered feminine helps us to understand why so few (and perhaps no) women were accepted as active participants in Modernismo. Author Sarah Moody studies how particular writers contributed to the idea of a feminine aesthetic and tracks the intellectual networks of Modernismo through periodicals and personal papers, such as albums and correspondence. Buenos Aires, Paris, and Montevideo figure prominently in this transatlantic study, which reexamines some of the most important period writers in Spanish, including Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, and Enrique Gómez Carrillo. This book also considers the critiques launched by women writers, such as Aurora Cáceres, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and MarÍa Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, who experienced Modernista exclusion firsthand, deconstructed the Modernista discourse of a modern, “feminine” style, and built literary success in alternative terms. These writers reoriented the discussion about women in modernity to address women’s education, professionalization, and advocacy for social and civic improvements. In this study, Modernismo emerges as both a literary style and an intellectual network, in which style and sociability are mutually determining and combine to form a system of prestige and validation that excluded women writers.

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9780826506887

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“Las Raras is an essential contribution to the field of modernista studies and Latin American literary and cultural studies of the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on a group of women writers, some of whom are rather well-known and others much lesser-known, it is one of very few book-length studies that brings these texts to a English-reading audience.” - Andrew Reynolds, author of The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality and Material Culture: Modernismo’s Unstoppable Presses

Author Information

Sarah Moody is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama.

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