Las Raras: Feminine Style, Intellectual Networks, and Women Writers During Spanish-American Modernismo

Las Raras: Feminine Style, Intellectual Networks, and Women Writers during Spanish-American Modernismo 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 the movement. Las Raras studies how particular writers contributed to the idea of a feminine aesthetic, and it 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 trans-Atlantic study, which re-examines some of the most important period writers in Spanish, including Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, Enrique Gómez Carrillo.

The book also considers the critiques launched by women writers, such as Aurora Cáceres, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Emma de la Barra (César Duáyen), who experienced Modernista exclusion first-hand, 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.

Sarah Moody is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama.