Modernism and the New Spain

How could a country seen as remote, backwards, and barely European become a pivotal site for reinventing the continent after the devastation of the Great War? Modernism and the New Spain argues that the "Spanish problem"--Spain's historically troubled relationship with Europe, from the Moorish invasions through the Inquisition to the twentieth century--animated a wide range of overlooked modernist formulations of cosmopolitanism. Gayle Rogers reconstructs an archive of cross-cultural collaborations that aimed to resolve these matters in order to demonstrate the surprising mutual constitution of two modernist movements--one in Britain, the other in Spain, and stretching at key moments to Ireland and the Americas. Writers including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Stephen Spender and a circle of their Spanish peers led by the philosopher Josi?? Ortega y Gasset cooperated to attach a host of cultural agendas to the rebirth of a European Spain as a microcosm for the emergence of a new continent. Their vision of Spain as the convergence of Europe's geographical, political, racial, and gendered margins culminated during the Spanish Civil War.

Drawing on transnational literary studies, periodical studies, translation studies, and comparative literary history, Modernism and the New Spain illuminates why Spain has remained a problematic space on the scholarly map of international modernisms. Rogers synthesizes works of writers who were presumed to have little contact and to be separated by Europe's traditional divisions (North/South, Germanic/Latin, and expanding/declining empires). He combines extensive archival research with cutting-edge methodologies and arguments to redress the gaps between English- and Spanish-language criticism. Through innovative readings of foundational texts--Eliot's Criterion, Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's Three Guineas--Rogers reveals modernism's symbiotic development with the works of Antonio Marichalar, Victoria Ocampo, Federico Garci??a Lorca and others. In periodicals, fiction, poetry, translations, and correspondence, across the production and reception of texts, modernist writers created alliances that unified local and international reforms to reinvent Europe not in the London-Paris-Berlin nexus, but in Madrid.

Gayle Rogers is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.