Cathy L. Jrade – författare

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic BookModernismo arose in Spanish American literature as a confrontation with and a response to modernizing forces that were transforming Spanish American society in the later nineteenth century. In this book, Cathy L. Jrade undertakes a full exploration of the modernista project and shows how it provided a foundation for trends and movements that have continued to shape literary production in Spanish America throughout the twentieth century.Jrade opens with a systematic consideration of the development of modernismo and then proceeds with detailed analyses of works-poetry, narrative, and essays-that typified and altered the movement's course. In this way, she situates the writing of key authors, such as RubÉn DarÍo, JosÉ MartÍ, and Leopoldo Lugones, within the overall modernista project and traces modernismo's influence on subsequent generations of writers.Jrade's analysis reclaims the power of the visionary stance taken by these creative intellectuals. She firmly abolishes any lingering tendency to associate modernismo with affectation and effete elegance, revealing instead how the modernistas' new literary language expressed their profound political and epistemological concerns.

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.

Delmira Agustini (1886–1914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her verse, especially her daring eroticism, her inventive appropriation of vampirism, and her morbid embrace of death and pain. No work until now, however, has shown how her poetry reflects a search for an alternative, feminized discourse, a discourse that engages in an imaginative dialogue with Rubén Darío’s recourse to literary paternity and undertakes an audacious rewriting of social, sexual, and poetic conventions.In the first major exploration of Agustini’s life and work, Cathy L. Jrade examines her energizing appropriation and reinvention of modernista verse and the dynamics of her breakthrough poetics, a poetics that became a model for later women writers.