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Iris Zavala argues that Hispanic modernism is an emancipatory narrative of self-representation. Out of Cuba's struggles against Spanish and U.S. colonialism, modernism emerged among the Hispanic intelligentsia as an attempt to create a collective narrative rejecting colonial cultural patterns.

Hispanic modernism crusaded for a cosmopolitanism opposed to colonialism. The work of José Martí, Rubén Darío, Valle-Inclán, Unamuno and Julián del Casal rejects a hegemonic idea of progress and the imposition of alien political and cultural practices. Through a poetics of negation, they generated a revolutionary social and artistic awakening that resulted in the unprecedented cultural achievments of Hispanic modernism.

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CHOICE Review

Zavala is a prolific scholar, especially in the field of modernist literature as it applies to the Hispanic field. The present work, with its significant subtitle, is the culmination of a series of individual books and articles dealing with key figures like Rub'en Dar'io, Valle-Incl'an, Unamuno, and the influence of Bakhtin's circle in Spain and Latin America. In the nine extremely dense chapters, enclosed by a valuable introduction ("The Open-ended Text of Modernity") and a useful conclusion ("Decolonization and Social Identities"), Zavala forces the reader to grapple with themes, concepts, and texts relating to the dialogical social imaginary, self-representation, lyric poetry and the constitution of the self, the struggle for (dialogical cultural) signs, and other abstruse ideas. Scholars interested in criticism as an agent of social change, and the role of modernist literature as a point of departure for 20th-century cultural developments, will do well to preserve and reread this provocative work on the discourse of theory. The sections on popular culture and women's literature ("gendered modernities") are quite palatable, notwithstanding the daunting scholarship, the esoteric concepts, and the theoretical jargon, all brought to bear throughout this challenging and formidable new study of Hispanic modernism. J. Walker; Queen's University