Instead of Modernity: The Western Canon and the Incorporation of the Hispanic (c. 1850–75)(Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century)

This book revisits the claim that a key dimension of cultural modernity - understood as a turn to the autonomy of the signs and the erasure of the 'face of man' - arose in the mid-nineteenth century. It presents an alternative to that obsession, focusing instead on the aesthetic appreciation of forms through which connections are realised across place and time. The book is one of few to offer a comparative approach to numerous major writers and artists of this period over diverse countries. Specifically, the comparative approach overcomes the constitutively ambiguous relation between the modern and the Hispanic. The Hispanic is often imagined as at once foundational for and excluded from the modern world. Its reincorporation into the story of the mid-century unsettles the notion of modernity. The book offers instead an experiment in writing, tracing commonalities across place and time, and drawing on mid-century expressions of such likenesses. -- .

Table of Contents:

Introduction: From modernity to the aesthetic appreciation of history
1 Meeting: Coming together and taking shape
2 Departure: To leap beyond yet nearer bring
3 Sacrifice: Everyone must die
4 Repose: Forms of shared distraction
Index

Andrew Ginger is Professor of Comparative Studies and Vice Provost for International Engagement at Northeastern University

'It is is a lavishly illustrated and ambitiously interdisciplinary volume. Ginger’s range of references is impressive, flitting between preserved insects from the Americas and brain images from France. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert sit with Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Augusto Ferrán; Friedrich Nietzsche finds himself in the company of Rosalía de Castro and Juana Manuela Gorriti. London’s Crystal Palace stands alongside José Augustín Arrieta’s mirror paintings... it succeeds admirably in substantiating its conviction that the inclusion of the Hispanic world in narratives of modernism and modernity enables the identification of resonant patterns of cultural production. Distinctiveness thus transforms the appreciation of similarity, rather than being simply eclipsed by it.'
Modern Language Review

'Instead of Modernity certainly performs an important service by reincorporating the Hispanosphere into modern culture, and by upending simplistic understandings of modernity in turn. The world it portrays is certainly Quixotic, but in the manner stressed by Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard’: as something more fragmentary, more
subtle, more incongruous than previously imagined – and ‘infinitely richer’ for it.'
Romance, Revolution & Reform

'From this new vantage point, both temporality and the concept of modernity are blown out of the water ... [the] broad outlook transcends the limits of what we understand by Hispanism ... and in this quest for the shared and the disruptive, [Ginger] works with pieces of art, turns of language, figures of speech, images from the past and the present, on a surface that as soon opens out to an infinite horizon as it shrinks to a specific time and place.'
Jesusa Vega, Anales de Historia del Arte