Modernism and the New Spain

Assembling works in a variety of genres, Gayle Rogers reconstructs an archive of cross-cultural exchanges to reveal the mutual constitution of two modernist movements -- one in Britain, the other in Spain, with both stretching at key moments to Ireland and the Americas. Several sites of transnational collaboration form the core of Rogers's innovative literary history: the relationship between T. S. Eliot's Criterion and Jos'e Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente; the 1922 publication of Joyce's Ulysses and how its forward-thinking sentiments on race and nation resonated within Spain; the connections between fighting Spanish fascism and dismantling the English patriarchal system in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, especially as activated by the Argentine dissident Victoria Ocampo; and the international, anti-fascist poetic community formed by Stephen Spender, Manuel Altolaguirre, and others as they sought to establish Federico Garc'ia Lorca as an apolitical Spanish-European poet. Mining novels, periodicals, biographies, translations, and poetry in English and in Spanish, Modernism and the New Spain reveals how writers created reformative alliances to reinvent post-Great War Europe not in the London-Paris-Berlin nexus, but in Madrid.