Madrid's Forgotten Avant-garde: Between Essentialism And Modernity (sussex Studies In Spanish History)
by Silvina Schammah Gesser /
2015 / English / PDF
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Madrids Forgotten Avant-Garde explores the role played by artists
and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various
competing images of national identity which polarized Spanish
society prior to the Civil War. The convergence of modern and
essentialist discourses and practices, especially in literature and
poetry, in what is conventionally called in Spanish letters The
Generation of 27, created fissures between competing views of
aesthetics and ideology that cut across political affiliation.
Silvina Schammah exposes the paradoxes facing Madrids cultural
vanguards, as they were torn by their ambition for universality,
cosmopolitanism and transcendence on the one hand and by the
centripetal forces of nationalistic ideologies on the other. Taking
upon themselves roles to become the disseminators and populizers of
radical positions and world-views first elaborated and conducted by
the young urban intelligentsia, their proposed aim of incorporating
diverse identities embedded in different cultural constructions and
discourse was to have very real and tragic consequences as
political and intellectual lines polarized in the years prior to
the Spanish Civil War.
Madrids Forgotten Avant-Garde explores the role played by artists
and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various
competing images of national identity which polarized Spanish
society prior to the Civil War. The convergence of modern and
essentialist discourses and practices, especially in literature and
poetry, in what is conventionally called in Spanish letters The
Generation of 27, created fissures between competing views of
aesthetics and ideology that cut across political affiliation.
Silvina Schammah exposes the paradoxes facing Madrids cultural
vanguards, as they were torn by their ambition for universality,
cosmopolitanism and transcendence on the one hand and by the
centripetal forces of nationalistic ideologies on the other. Taking
upon themselves roles to become the disseminators and populizers of
radical positions and world-views first elaborated and conducted by
the young urban intelligentsia, their proposed aim of incorporating
diverse identities embedded in different cultural constructions and
discourse was to have very real and tragic consequences as
political and intellectual lines polarized in the years prior to
the Spanish Civil War.