A Companion to José Enrique Rodó

the long version

"This is the first full-length study in English of the work of Jose Enrique Rodo (Montevideo, 1871-Palermo, Sicily, 1917), one of the great intellectual figures in Spanish and the most important essayist of modernismo, the movement that aimed to attain aesthetic excellence by revitalising Spanish literature. He is best known for an essay, Ariel (1900), that marked the consolidation of modernity in Latin America in the wake of mass immigration and of Spain's crushing defeat against a United States that had already displayed unequivocal signs of its might to its southern neighbours. The circumstances were therefore most propitious for reflection on what being Latin American meant; Ariel did precisely that, as it pondered "roots" and proposed future "routes". The Companion is organised as an intellectual biography, divided into ten main chapters, starting with context, studying all of Rodo's work chronologically, some of it for the first time, and ending with his legacy, both immediate and current. It provides an up-to-date assessment of Rodo's writings which bears in mind established criticism and draws widely on unpublished material from the impressive archives of Rodo's papers that are held in Montevideo. The aim of the book has been, as befits its subject matter, idealistic: to cover all relevant aspects of Rodo's work in order to give the fullest possible account of his worldview, taking on little-explored areas that shed new light on it, notably the relationship between his philosophical stance, religion, and politics."--Cover page 4