Las Raras

Feminine Style, Intellectual Networks, and Women Writers during Spanish-American Modernismo

Sarah Moody

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780826506887, 9780826506894
• eBook ISBN: 9780826506900
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Premio al Mejor Libro, Latin American Studies Association–Nineteenth-Century Section, 2025
Premio Victoria Urbano de Monografía Crítica, Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2025 (co-winner)

Las Raras 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 Modernismo. Author Sarah Moody studies how particular writers contributed to the idea of a feminine aesthetic and 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 transatlantic study, which reexamines some of the most important period writers in Spanish, including Rubén Darío, Amado Nervo, and Enrique Gómez Carrillo.

This book also considers the critiques launched by women writers, such as Aurora Cáceres, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira, who experienced Modernista exclusion firsthand, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. The Missing Women of Modernismo
• 1. The Feminine Aesthetic of Modernismo
• 2. Crónicas de París: Darío and Gómez Carrillo on the Feminine Modern
• 3. Alternative Modernities: Exile and the Re-invention of Clorinda Matto de Turner
• 4. Rareza: María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira and Montevideo’s “Generation of 1900”
• 5. Souvenirs: Aurora Cáceres and the Álbum personal as Collection
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index