The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity

<b>This book aims to develop a broader view of the trajectory of Hispanic modernity tracing a motif of recurring impasse first seen in peninsular Baroque texts and continuing into Latin American colonial and modern literature.</b><br><br>Inspired by Walter Benjamin's notion of constellation this book draws on theories of Latin American modernity to investigate the Spanish literary Baroque and its repetitions as a historical-cultural predicament in Latin American colonial and modern texts. Inca Garcilaso Borges Carpentier Rulfo Darío and a range of Latin American Post-Symbolist poets (Agustini Pizarnik Sosa Lienlaf and Huinao) are juxtaposed with the Lazarillo the Quijote Fuenteovejuna and Góngora's Soledades to produce original readings on topics of violence rape frustrated pilgrimage and the truncated ambitions of colonized peoples and confessional minorities. In turn Benjamin is juxtaposed with Mallarmé to recast the aesthetic dynamics of modernity in political terms in order to understand the Baroque within a more broadly historicized concept of the avant-garde. Generous in scope this book addresses the community of Spanish and Latin American criticism as well as emerging and pressing theoretical concerns within the field of comparative literature.