Quixotic Modernists
Subtitle: Reading Gender in Tristana, Trigo, and Martinez Sierra
Publisher: Bucknell University Press; UNKNO
Published: January 30, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780838756638
Subjects: Novels, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Spanish; Portugal; Spain; European - Spanish & Portuguese; Regional, Ethnic, Genre, Specific Subject; 19th century; 20th century; History and criticism; Sex role in literature; Spanish fiction
Description: "Quixotic Modernists gives close readings of two novels by two little-studied writers of the early twentieth century in Spain, Felipe Trigo's Las ingenuas (1901) and Maria Martinez Sierra's Tu eres la paz (1906), in relation to the canonical Tristana by Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist. This study shows the modern message (regarding gender), and modernist qualities of the prose of these works. Included are discussions of Quijote intertexts, proverbial language and tactics, the angel and the "mujer-nina", flower, water, and animal imagery, and visual arts in relation to gender definition. Also included are contemporary responses to the novels and material about the authors' lives and Spain's social conditions in the early twentieth century. Quixotic Modernists integrates these themes into a study of the novelization of difficulties in transforming contemporary gender and class roles. In all three authors works, this process of change in roles for both men and women becomes a quixotic enterprise, in which artists as/and characters search to reconnect with an elusive material, social body." "The work brings a new perspective to Spanish narrative's turn-of-the-twentieth-century collective and psychological landscapes and the effects on writers of the Quijote's influence."--book jacket.