Tides of Progress

The first study of Anglo-Hispanic exchanges in print culture between the Spanish-American War and the Spanish Civil War, surfacing new archival materials to shed light on global modernities and regional interactions.Tides of Progress studies the connections, interactions, and mutual appraisals between the Hispanic and Anglo spheres during a critical period in which print culture evolved from the province of the lettered few into a mass-media phenomenon. Print culture is increasingly gaining recognition as a fruitful area for literary study and literary history, and this volume’s comparative approach significantly expands the scope of current scholarship. Across all the main venues of the book – New York, Mexico City, San Juan, Buenos Aires, Kingston, Panama City, Guadalajara – periodicals flourished, borrowing and translating freely across linguistic boundaries. In some cases, they simply imported ideas; in others, they offered translated texts, ran columns in the other language, or even produced fully bilingual editions. Ideas of progress were reframed by translation, and they were often coded as ‘modernity’ in terms of consumer products or ‘modernism’ in literary texts, in contradistinction to more local forms such as literary modernismo.Tides of Progress provides compelling insights into – and challenges assumptions about – some of the region’s key literary figures while also surfacing significant new archival materials. The volume’s authors collectively present print culture as becoming one of the most visible ways through which modernity and ideas of progress were encountered, consumed, shared, and assimilated by the public, in both the Anglo and Hispanic spheres.