La novela modernista hispanoamericana: Definicion y estudio de sus inicios.

Abstract

This study focuses on the novelistic production of Spanish American modernismo. I contend that, as was the case in poetry, short stories, and essays, the modernista novel brought about a complete renovation of this genre, opening and exploring new ways of expression in order to deal with what they felt was a new and more complex relation between the individual and modern society. After a critical reading of the most significant studies on this subject in the first chapter, I elaborate a definition of the modernista novel based on two main characteristics: the idea of the novel as a work of art, autonomous from the public sphere and distinguishable from other disciplines; and the tension between objectivity and subjectivity: these novelists believe that "modern" art must express the "modern" contradiction of living in a negative present, shaped by the effects of modernization, but longing for a nostalgic past or a utopian future, both of them equally unattainable. The concern with the art of narrating in these novels, and the existence of their characters always in conflict with reality explicitly connect the modernista novel with what the writers perceived as their main model: Don Quijote. Beyond the thematic dispute that has traditionally separated modernismo from americanismo, all of these narratives share a common ground that differentiates it both from naturalism and the avant-garde. Finally I establish a corpus of novels that, I believe, are to be considered modernistas. In the next three chapters, I study how modernista writers started to break with the naturalist novel first by means of other genres, as in Amistad funesta by Jose Marti (chapter three), who uses such a rival form of naturalism as the novela de folletin, and De sobremesa (chapter four) by Jose Asuncion Silva, who creates a highly complicated narrative with the reading of a private diary as its core. At the turn of the century, Sangre patricia by Manuel Diaz Rodriguez (chapter five) subverts naturalism from within and exemplifies the final consolidation of the modernista novel and its new perception of the subject and reality.