Defining and Defying Borders: Tracing Hispanism across Literary Magazines

“Grounded on rigorous and innovative archival research, Defining and Defying Borders offers an exciting view of magazines beyond their national contexts, offering new interpretations related to the circulation of print and ideas across the Atlantic. Vanessa Marie Fernández offers not only a lucid study of some of the key magazines in Latin America and Spain, but also a new way to conceptualize the role of the magazine in the Spanish-language world.” Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, and author of Strategic Occidentalism

“Erudite and detailed, Fernández’s Defining and Defying Borders takes readers on a journey through the friendships, disagreements, and even tragic confrontations that defined transatlantic Hispanism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Fernández brilliantly illustrates the significance of the magazine format in the development (and breakdowns) of these relations. Defining and Defying Borders is a rigorous retelling of the mirrors that Spanish and Spanish American intellectuals held up to each other during a fascinating, formative, and turbulent period.” María del Pilar Blanco, Professor of Spanish American and Comparative Literature, University of Oxford

“Fernández convincingly argues that modernist literary periodicals opened a critical space for dialogue, exchange, and dispute between writers across Latin America and Spain and that it was, moreover, in those venues that the very existence and nature of Hispanic literature and culture were contested, debated, and transformed in the 1920s. Fernández’s splendid book is thus a major contribution to our rethinking of global modernism, Hispanism, and transatlantic studies.” Alejandro Mejías-López, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University Bloomington

“Carefully exploring and addressing the tensions in Spain and Latin America’s postcolonial relationship through the study of journals, magazines, and newspapers during the early twentieth century, Defining and Defying Borders is an insightful contribution to the field of transatlantic studies. Fernández eloquently resists the categorical divisions of Latin Americanism vs. Peninsularism to provoke a reflection on how Latin American and Spanish intellectuals were transgressing national borders through print culture.” Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Oregon