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This article considers the crónica modernista to offer a case study of what comparative media studies might contribute to the study of Latin American literary and cultural history. Through an analysis centered on the Havana-based Literary weekly La Habana elegante, I argue that although cronistas clearly promoted the exclusivity of their writing in ways that anticipated twentieth-century notions of literary value, they also envisioned ideas of literature that disappeared after the genres heyday in the 1880s and 1890s. Within La Habana elegante, one of those ideas took the form of what I am calling networked literature, through which some cronistas sought to make literature a vehicle for mobilizing social and political change. The periodical's crónicas envisioned the regions culture as a global leader in modeling that kind of literature for an expanding world of print. Recovering La Habana elegante's alternative notion of literature extends observations within existing scholarship on the genre about its role in promoting emerging notions of pan-Latin American identity. It also sheds new light on one of the period's leading cronistas, Julián del Casal, who offered his own alternative to La Habana elegante's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the circles to which he belonged during his youth, Pedro Henríquez Ureña was one of the first to gather information regarding the American literary culture in the Spanish language and systematize it through modern methods. This work is inscribed with the marks of his situation in time and space: the climate of Spanish regenerationism, the idealist Hispanic theses developed by José Enrique Rodó in Ariel, and various formulations fed by the philosophical environment of spiritualism. In the measure in which Henríquez Ureña established the bases of his historiographical model on the notion of a Hispanic literary community, his writings surpassed the renewed and vindicative horizon of the regenerationist and Arielist theses in order to claim a utopian dimension. In this model the regenerationist thesis has a strategic importance in the Spanish Renaissance. Thanks to this process the Dominican writer contributed significantly to the design and accreditation of the idea of a Hispanic literary community. This article will explain this contribution in the field of intellectual history, especially with respect to the socially constructed identity of the intellectuals and the universes of concepts through those who regulate their behavior and intervene in the public sphere. [TRANSLATION]

In the first third of the 20th century the literary field was rearranged, in part around the controversial topic of money. The modernization of the publishing industry implicated as much a change in the concept of the editor as in the presence of the author in the negotiations of the book. The article studies the decisive protagonism in the editorial sector of some intellectuals that began from a few progressive approaches in an economic and cultural context of expansion. The capital investments brought about this rearrangement as much to the level of the publishing as the creation of the book. [TRANSLATION]

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s stay in Argentina (1909-1914) allows us to analyze aspects of Hispano-American relations at the beginning of the 20th century, and analyze more concretely the problem of the Spanish editorial industry in relation to its expansion in the American market. This is analyzed here according to Blasco, who as an object of study exhibits not only the figure of the European colonist but also of the mechanic of the editorial trade and of the best-selling author that he came to be. In this way, Blasco outlines a lucid view of the situation of the writer and the editor in modern society, but also currently: the extraordinary compendium that defines a policy of self-management as author-editor. [TRANSLATION]

This article examines the issue of whether contemporary Latin American literature can continue to be considered national literature. Through a look at the panorama of publishing in Spain and Latin America, it reflects on the fragmentation of the markets and its effect on the genres and styles of contemporary authors, and posits the appearance of a more individualized literary occupation that is less subject to considerations of national or regional identity. The article discusses the works of a wide range of Latin American authors from generations appearing between 1990 and 2010, marking its discussion within the context of observations of Roger Bartra and Jesús Martín-Barbero regarding the nationalist criticism such as ideology and the breakdown of the role of the nation as a transcendent totality. It also takes note that, together with the pro-government nationalism promoted by national states, an autonomous and individualist tendency has existed among writers, fruit of the modern tradition, which brings them to look for their own space at the margins of bourgeois society. The post-national authors of this day and age, the article notes, are characterized not so much by the desire to expand national borders but rather to reject them. [TRANSLATION]

This article outlines a map of the evolution of urban poetry in Mexican estridentismo, from the explosion of the movement in 1921 until 1925, analyzing some of the key texts. The affiliation of the poetry with futurist and cubist models are explored, along with the sociopolitical context of post-revolutionary Mexico. The similarities and differences of the movement to European vanguardism are equally analyzed and their relationship within its own context conceived as a peripheral modernity. I propose a blended reading that reveals a much more ambiguous relationship with urban modernity and tecnophilia, in part owed to the social, political and economic context (post-revolutionary Mexico) incongruous with such proposals. It is exactly in the tension inherent to the project of nationalizing such vocabularies of vanguardism where we find keys with which to theorize the specificity of vanguardism, not only in Mexico, but rather in all of Latin America. [TRANSLATION]