Book contents
- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Unfinished Histories
- Part I Literature in the Early Colony
- Part II Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century
- 3 Alexander von Humboldt and the Cultural Invention of Cuba Among Its Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Elite
- 4 Philosophy and Pedagogy in Félix Varela, José de la Luz y Caballero, and Enrique José Varona
- 5 Mercedes Merlin and the Rhetoric of Life Writing, Exile, and Race
- 6 The Lyric Vernacular of Cuban Romanticism
- 7 Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as Literary Precursor and Transatlantic Intellectual
- 8 Racialized Futures
- 9 Journalism and Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture
- 10 José Martí as Hemispheric Visionary
- 11 Julián del Casal and the Other Faces of Cuban Modernismo
- 12 Performance Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Cuban Theater
- Part III Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic
- Part IV The Revolution’s Literary-Cultural Initiatives and Their Early Discontents
- Part V Cuba and Its Diasporas into the New Millennium
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
11 - Julián del Casal and the Other Faces of Cuban Modernismo
from Part II - Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2024
- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Unfinished Histories
- Part I Literature in the Early Colony
- Part II Cuban Literature’s Long Nineteenth Century
- 3 Alexander von Humboldt and the Cultural Invention of Cuba Among Its Nineteenth-Century Intellectual Elite
- 4 Philosophy and Pedagogy in Félix Varela, José de la Luz y Caballero, and Enrique José Varona
- 5 Mercedes Merlin and the Rhetoric of Life Writing, Exile, and Race
- 6 The Lyric Vernacular of Cuban Romanticism
- 7 Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda as Literary Precursor and Transatlantic Intellectual
- 8 Racialized Futures
- 9 Journalism and Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture
- 10 José Martí as Hemispheric Visionary
- 11 Julián del Casal and the Other Faces of Cuban Modernismo
- 12 Performance Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Cuban Theater
- Part III Literary and Intellectual Culture in the Twentieth-Century Republic
- Part IV The Revolution’s Literary-Cultural Initiatives and Their Early Discontents
- Part V Cuba and Its Diasporas into the New Millennium
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter complicates Cuba’s contributions to Spanish American modernismo, interweaving close readings of the poetry of Julián del Casal and others in his circle with larger polemics about Cuban poetry that have marked Casal’s critical reception in Cuba into the twenty-first century. Casal, characterized in the chapter as an enduring mystery, a provocateur, and a dissident, wrote journalistic crónicas, as did José Martí. But Casal’s work embraced the more inward-turning estheticist and decadentist modernista tropes drawn from French Parnassianism, which has led to what the chapter portrays as the protracted debate about Casal and Martí as opposites, an overdrawn contrast in this chapter’s view, ranging from attacks on Casal as “exotic” or “Frenchified” to his recasting as an “autonomous agent” who rebelled against literary norms. If Martí rebelled on behalf of others, the chapter affirms, Casal rebelled to free himself, even if it meant denying his body certain desires and habits, an observation pointing to critical initiatives to contextualize Casal as a gay writer, which the essay also examines.
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- The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature , pp. 185 - 199Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024