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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 this article we analyze the novel Pedro Paramo of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, from symbolisms of pre-Hispanic origin, as well as expressions characteristic of the colonial catholic Hispanic imagery. The study aims to expand certain concepts about life and death, smiles and guilt, which have been remade by the novelist in a c0ntext with an underlying foundation of beliefs that has significant elements of indigenous world views. The analysis tries to expand on the symbolism of Comal, the clay dish used for cooking the traditional flat maize pancakes. The Comal, as a tool of Pre- Cortés origin, is analyzed as a symbol of the mythical rural world that Pedro Paramo owns, as great chief of the town of Comala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Santa, by Federico Gamboa, is one of the most analyzed novels in Mexico, in the period that goes from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, one has to admit that an approach to his contemporary readers is still necessary. In this article, I propose some ideas with regards to the reception of the novel during the Porfiriato, as well as to the modernity of Santa and the divorce established between the critique and the literature in the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]