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.
"This is an excellent book and an important intervention on debates about literary and cultural studies on Latin America. What emerges is not a mere defense of modern Latin American high culture, so-called, but a nuanced and balanced appreciation of the place of 'high' art in Latin American modernity, which brings out literary Modernism's complex articulation of positive and negative aspects of ideas of tradition and modernity in a Latin American context. Sharman's study is a valuable corrective to dominating trends in criticism in Hispanic Studies and beyond." - Professor Phillip Swanson, University of Sheffield"Sharman has written a scholarly, thought-provoking, admirably balanced study that makes an important contribution to the fields of literary theory and cultural studies as well as to the study of modern and contemporary Spanish-American literature." - Jorge Luis Castillo, University of California, Santa Barbara