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.
Introduction: The Missing Women of Modernismo
Chapter 1. The Feminine Aesthetic of Modernismo
Chapter 2. Crónicas de París: Darío and Gómez Carrillo on the Feminine Modern
Chapter 3. Alternative Modernities: Exile and the Reinvention of Clorinda Matto de Turner
Chapter 4. Rareza: María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira and Montevideo’s “Generation of 1900”
Chapter 5. Souvenirs: Aurora Cáceres and the Álbum personal as Collection
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Voir