European aestheticism and Spanish American modernismo : artist protagonists and the philosophy of art for art's sake /

For late-19th- and early-20th-century European and Spanish American writers adhering to the "art for art's sake" credo, art took on the trappings of religion. Style and form are paramount. Life imitates art. Comfort (School of Modern Languages, Georgia Institute of Technology) goes beyond the expansive coverage of the modernistas in Anibal Gonzalez's A Companion to Spanish American Modernismo (CH, Jun'08, 45-5451) by linking writings of Jose Asuncion Silva, Ruben Dario, Manuel Gutierrez Najera, and Julian del Casal to those of three of their European counterparts--Oscar Wilde, J.-K. Huysmans, and Thomas Mann--and identifying numerous instances of borrowings and mutual influences. Despite the elitist and escapist tendencies of both movements, each contained elements of social and political engagement, especially in prose texts, where writers reacted negatively to the crass materialism and commercialism of bourgeois culture and a market economy that converted art into a commodity. Spanish American authors, in the guise of aesthete/dandy/flaneur, often attempted to fashion themselves into works of art; however, since they lacked the accoutrements of European modernity, they produced results that were more derivative than original. This comparative study is a solid example of contemporary transatlantic scholarship. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. M. S. Arrington Jr. University of Mississippi