The dissonant legacy of modernismo

In The Dissonant Legacy of MODERNISMO, Gwen Kirkpatrick offers a provocative new reading of a crucial and often misunderstood period of Spanish American literature. Most studies of modernismo have focused on the poetry of Rubén Darío and have noted the movement's aestheticism, distance from mundane concerns, and its unmistakable French influences. Kirkpatrick concentrates instead on important negations of harmony and the movement's internal dismantling of its own precepts. Major contradictions within the movement itself are revealed through the works of the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones and the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig. Extending her analysis to later writers such as Ramón López Velarde, César Vallejo, and Alfonsina Storni, Kirkpatrick shows the changes that foreshadow the more overt experiments of these poets and illuminates the continuity between the modernistas and later generations.^ Powerful statements by Latin American writers from the late nineteenth century to the present attest to the impact of modernismo. By showing the movement's bases in Romanticism and Symbolism, the author sets the stage for ironic and parodic disavowals by the dissonant modernistas, primarily L