Religaciones hispano-americanas en torno del 98: Los usos de La Tempestad en el Modernismo [Darí­o y Rodó]

Abstract

With the 'Disaster' in 1898, Latinamerican Modernism's anti-imperialist reaction involved the revisión of its cultural affiliations. As is well known, the Hispanism and Latinism deployed in Modernist writing have been frequently criticized as symptoms of a persistent 'colonialism'. This paper analyzes the relationships established between Latinamerican and Spanish writers from the 98 Defeat on -which were in turn promoted by peninsular Hispanism since the 400th Anniversary Festivities in 1892- and the way in which Modernist writers, faced with a situation that confirmed Saxon hegemony and 'Latin decadence', reconsider the links with Spain. In this context the anti-imperialist reading of Shakespeare's Tempest [Darí­o's "El Triunfo de Calibán" and Rodó's Ariel] becomes a powerful relinking phenomenon around which the relationships with the former 'Mother Land' are debated. For Modernist writers, according to our reading, the union with Spanish intellectuals entailed strengthening a common literary system in the internationalized literary market. In such a system, Darí­o's leadership by the turn of the century and the possibility for Latinamericans to compete on a par with the Spanish were becoming self-evident