Las Raras: Feminine Style, Intellectual Networks, and Women Writers during Spanish-American Modernismo

Las Raras argues that Modernistas' advocacy for a feminine writing style contributed to their exclusion of women as active participants in Modernismo. Sarah Moody explores how particular writers contributed to the idea of a feminine aesthetic and tracks the intellectual networks of Modernismo through periodicals and personal papers. Buenos Aires, Paris, and Montevideo are prominent in this transatlantic study, which reexamines important period writers in Spanish, including Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, and Enrique Gómez Carrillo. Women writers, such as Aurora Cáceres, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and MarÍa Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, deconstructed the Modernista discourse of a modern, "feminine" style and built literary success in alternative terms, reorienting the discussion about women in modernity to address women's education, professionalization, and advocacy for social and civic improvements.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2024
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

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.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780826506887