Parnassianism in the theory and literature of Spanish-American and Spanish poets.

The tendency of Parnassianism is commonly seen by critics of Hispanic literatures to combine with other literary traits in the creation of new poetic languages to produce Modernismo in the late nineteenth century. This study reveals and analyzes how the Parnassian tendency itself developed in the 1870's, as a tendency with its own particularities and sequence, and then was further magnified in the 1880's and 1890's. In the critical prose, short fiction, poetry, letters and periodical literature where artistic innovation made its debut, theoretical and poetical values (ekphrasis especially) are ubiquitous. Jose Marti, Manuel Gutierrez Najera, Manuel Gonzalez Prada, Ruben Dario, and Manuel Reina are among those of this early time frame. In the 1890's such concerns are consolidated in broad poetic theories, in the work of those mentioned as well as in writings of Julian del Casal, Leopoldo Diaz, Salvador Diaz Miron, and Salvador Rueda in particular. In poetic imagery, distinctively (Hispanic) Parnassian treatments of domestic interiors, art objects, and women predominate in the 1880's, while Grecian treatments of many themes prevail throughout the 1890's, explicable in terms of Hispanic response to social and cultural crisis. Intertextual aspects of these authors' writings, among themselves and in relation with those of Theophile Gautier, Leconte de lisle, Jose Maria de Heredia, and Theodore de Banville, are examined. Hispanic Parnassianism is viewed as a calling up and transposition of the visual arts to defend, strengthen, and renew Hispanic letters, and to put such traits to use for the purposes of art in the world, and not for "l'art pour l'art" alone.PhDComparative literatureLatin American literatureModern literatureRomance literatureCaribbean literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161803/1/8812906.pd