Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History by Gayle Rogers (review)

Gayle Rogers’s Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History offers a much needed study of the intersections between Spanish and British Modernism, casting new light on these seemingly separate literary traditions. Rogers’s important contribution to Anglophone and Hispanic literary studies treads over geographic and linguistic boundaries to expose the unexplored terrain that canonical definitions of Modernism have overlooked.

Divided into five chapters, Rogers’s book examines Spanish and English literary journals, bilingual anthologies, translations, and biographies, to prove that Spain was very much a part of Modernism from its inception. Spanning the decades from the 1920s through the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Rogers also offers an important study of women’s seminal role in these cross channel exchanges, a neglected subject in both literary traditions that Rogers’s book sets out to correct.

In chapter 1, Rogers draws a previously unexplored connection between T. S. Eliot’s and José Ortega y Gasset’s ideas on Europeanisms. The expatriate American poet and the Spanish philosopher launched important journals that exhibited their continental visions for Europe. They hoped—through high culture—to connect their own countries to the larger continent and, in doing so, insert ravaged post-World War I Europe into the rest of the world. Eliot aspired to “redefine Europe from the English margin”(35) while Ortega’s Revista de Occidente introduced a modern, yet marginalized, Spain to Europe. Furthermore, Rogers points to Eliot and Ortega’s shared belief that Spain’s multicultural legacy could serve as a model for future “Europeanness.” To this end, Eliot gave Spanish literature a prominent role in his literary journal the Criterion, including a column by the Spanish essayist Antonio Marichalar. Ortega reciprocated by regularly featuring British modernist texts in Revista de Occidente. Within this transnational matrix, Rogers also highlights Marichalar’s vital role in Eliot’s and Ortega’s crosscultural dialogue. He bridged the isles and the peninsula writing for both the Criterion and Revista de Occidente and, despite Jorge Luis Borges’s claims to the contrary, was actually the first to translate fragments of Ulysses into Spanish. A figure that consistently traversed two cultural paradigms and brought their literary traditions together, Marichalar exemplifies the type of previously ignored connections Rogers unveils throughout his study.

In chapter 2, Rogers examines crosscultural connections between Ireland, Spain, and Europe in James Joyce’s Ulysses and details how Marichalar’s writings, including “James Joyce and His Labyrinth,” entered a pan-European debate on the novel. In the Spanish essayist’s account, Joyce’s “Irish-Europeanness” paralleled Ortega’s and Eliot’s conception of the way Britain and Spain connected with Europe from the periphery. Rogers considers Marichalar’s translations of excerpts from “Ithaca” and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy his most original contribution to early discussions on Ulysses. Marichalar imbues Molly’s Hispanic heritage with a voice and expands the limits of Joycean wordplay by broadening its linguistic and cultural register. Underscoring Spanish-Irish relations in the novel, Rogers offers a compelling reading of Ulysses that posits Gibraltar and its relation to Molly Bloom as a model for Joyce’s vision of Europe. Setting aside the violence that led to Britain’s victory over Spain, Rogers notes Joyce’s emphasis on Gibraltar as a multiethnic, multilingual space of transcultural interaction. Taking his suggestive analysis one step further, Rogers stresses the synchronicity between Joyce’s New Ireland and Ortega y Gasset’s New Spain.

Following Spain’s historical trajectory, Rogers details Spanish-British connections during the Second Republic (1931–36) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). In chapter 3, Rogers links Britain and Spain through the New Biography, a genre that provided another avenue for both countries to enter the pan-European literary discussion. Most engrossing is Rogers’s illustration of how the end of the Second Republic and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War marked a significant shift in...