University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Doctoral Dissertations University of Connecticut Graduate School 12-10-2014 Body, Gender, and Nation: Women Fiction Writers of Spanish American Modernismo [Mujer, cuerpo y nación: las narradoras del modernismo] Chantal Berthet University of Connecticut - Storrs,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Berthet, Chantal, "Body, Gender, and Nation: Women Fiction Writers of Spanish American Modernismo [Mujer, cuerpo y nación: las narradoras del modernismo]" (2014). Doctoral Dissertations. 637. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/637 Body, Gender, and Nation: Women Fiction Writers of Spanish American Modernismo [Mujer, cuerpo y nación: las narradoras del modernismo] Chantal Berthet, Ph.D. University of Connecticut, 2014 This dissertation examines a group of modernista women writers who are closely associated with the tradition of the nineteenth-century Latin American “foundational fiction” novel (Doris Sommer). I suggest that their works function as national allegories in the sense that they are integral to the debates on modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century. I discuss the continuity of this “foundational fictions” tradition within a different framework, modernismo, an aesthetic that is sometimes erroneously stereotyped as “apolitical” or “escapist.” By highlighting the peculiarities of the dialogue established between discourses of nation and the modernismo practiced by these authors, I show that their works are in fact profoundly, if not overtly, political. In the first chapter I analyze the treatment of race in Roque Moreno (1898) and Indómita (1904) by Teresa González de Fanning, and the second chapter examines Iris’ (Inés Echeverría Bello) Perfiles vagos (1910), a collection of stories that at times recalls the travel book.