Las Raras: Feminine Style, Intellectual Networks, and Women Writers during Spanish-American Modernismo [Paperback]

Premio al Mejor Libro en Humanidades, Latin American Studies AssociationNineteenth-Century Section, 2025
Premio Victoria Urbano de Monograf?a Cr?tica, Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2025 (co-winner)
Segundo Premio, Adela Zamudio Prize, Feministas Unidas, 2025

Las Rarasproposes 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 Rub?n Dar?o, Amado Nervo, and Enrique G?mez Carrillo.

This book also considers the critiques launched by women writers, such as Aurora C?ceres, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Mar?a 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 womens 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.

Gendered aesthetics in the discourses of Modernismo and women writers’ responses to their exclusion from creative participation in the movement"Las Raras is an essential contribution to the field of Modernista studies and Latin American literary and cultural studies of the turn of the twentielÓ