Under Spanish Eyes: Late Nineteenth-Century Postcolonial Views of Spanish American Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Robin Fiddian
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Brianne Jaquette

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] In The Locomotive and the Tree, I challenge the popular myth that the city of Pittsburgh was devoid of literary culture prior to the construction of the Carnegie museum, library, and concert hall in 1895. Pittsburgh, in fact, had a robust and thriving culture in general and specifically a literary scene that was rooted in newspaper production and was invested in the industrial aspects of the city�s growth. Much of the literary material coming from Pittsburgh was nonfiction or poetry, and it was in these forms that writers in Pittsburgh were able to come to terms with the changes taking place in a rapidly industrializing city. In contrast to scholarship that has emphasized the role of regional literature in this time period, my project uses periodical and print culture studies to analyze the localized literary culture of Pittsburgh. Instead of looking broadly at national literary culture that was disseminated from the East Coast outward, I argue for the need for research that broadens the scope of late-nineteenth century American literature by examining smaller networks of print.


Author(s):  
Lina del Castillo

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Spanish American intellectuals believed science could diagnose, treat, and excise an array of “colonial legacies” left in the wake of Spanish monarchical rule. Drawing on New Granada as a case in point, this chapter considers two revealing examples of how Spanish American contributions to emerging social sciences challenged prevailing European and North Atlantic ideas about race well before the late nineteenth century adoption and adaptation of eugenics. The first example emerges from an 1830s land-surveying catechism by noted New Granadan educator and publicist, Lorenzo María Lleras. The catechism sought to ensure equitable land surveys of indigenous communal land holding. The second example spotlights José María Samper’s mid-century invention of comparative political sociology. Spanish American intellectuals like Lleras and Samper ultimately believed that the deployment of sciences in society would produce a new “race” of democratic republicans.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

This chapter offers a periodization of the literatures of the Americas from the late nineteenth century through the postwar period. After acknowledging the emergence of a brief “transamerican literary imagination” forged in the early nineteenth century, I chart the gradual breakdown of this shared literary imagination in the second half of the nineteenth century and the concomitant rise of two distinct modes of literary production in the hemisphere: the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of the reader. I track the emergence of these systems: in the United States, through the mid-nineteenth-century “American Renaissance,” the late nineteenth-century “age of realism,” the interwar “modernist” period, and the “postmodern” era of the second half of the century; in Latin America, through the modernismo of the turn of the twentieth century, the vanguardia movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, and the boom decades of the 1960s and 1970s.


Author(s):  
Maria A. Windell

The second chapter centers a figure familiar within US sentimental literature, the tragic mulatta, placing her among hemispheric counterparts: the enslaved Moor and the Cuban mulata. Mary Peabody Mann’s only novel, Juanita (1887), offers an Uncle Tom’s Cabin-style antislavery narrative set in Cuba, importing a US racial hierarchy to the island. Mann’s novel overwrites figures such as the Cuban mulata and the mulato antislavery leader, replacing them with Eva-like children and a tragic US mulatta. Yet Cuban author Cirilo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés (1882) demonstrates how Juanita’s racial hierarchy diverges from that developing in late-nineteenth-century Cuba, which offered a different model of racial relationships. Erasing the multiracial nature of Cuba’s antislavery and anticolonial movements, Juanita prefigures US influence in Cuba following the Spanish–American War.


Author(s):  
Lori Harrison-Kahan

By focusing on the reception of Yekl, Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel of immigrant life in New York, this chapter considers the turn-of-the-twentieth-century controversy surrounding depictions of Jews in ghetto literature, arguing that this debate illuminates not only the challenges of ethno-racial representation and self-representation but also the slipperiness of realism itself. The chapter also posits a more inclusive interpretation of Jewish American realism by demonstrating the importance of an overlooked late nineteenth-century realist writer, Emma Wolf. It explores how Wolf’s novels Other Things Being Equal (1892) and Heirs of Yesterday (1900), which focus on experiences of Jewish families in San Francisco during the Progressive Era, offer important alternatives to the New York–centric ghetto genre, expanding the parameters of Jewish American literature in terms of region, class, gender, and religion.


1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Livio Di Matteo

This article examines a new set of historical microdata for insights on the wealth of the Irish in late-nineteenth-century Ontario. Regression analysis is used to determine whether or not the wealth of the Irish-born differed significantly from that of the Canadian-born and other birthplace groups.The traditional view has been that the Irish in nineteenth-century North America were impoverished and economically disadvantaged. In the American literature, certainly, Irish immigrants have been viewed as penniless, technologically backward, and inclined to reject rural for urban life because of their experience of famine (Akenson 1988: 48). Recent American empirical work has supported this view. For example, Stephen Herscovici (1993: 329) finds that in nineteenth-century Boston the native-born held significantly more wealth than immigrants and that the wealth of the Irish did not substantially increase over time. Ferrie (1994: 10) finds that the Irish-born were 69% less wealthy than the British-born in 1850 and that this gap rose to 72% in 1860, if age and duration in the United States are controlled for.


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