Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to “La Joven Literatura” by Leslie J. Harkema (review)

The figure of Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) looms large in the development of modern Spanish literature, as thoroughly demonstrated by Leslie Harkema’s Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth. By carefully tracing the literary and cultural impact of Unamuno’s writings, letters, and public lectures from the 1890s to the 1930s—four crucial decades for the development of Spain as a modern nation—Harkema presents an important and necessary critical rereading of the literary history of Spanish modernist and avant-garde movements. At the core of Harkema’s book lies a sophisticated critical examination of Unamuno’s work and influence that successfully overcomes old clichés and previously established commonplaces about the influential Basque polymath (poet, novelist, academic, politician, philologist, and philosopher, in no particular order), while at the same time newly presenting Unamuno’s philosophical and literary conceptualizations of youth in relation to a complex constellation of key networks of literary and cultural production in modern Spain.

Chapter 1, “Unamuno’s Poetics of Youth, 1895–1907” explores, from a comparative framework, the philosophical and religious foundations for Unamuno’s understanding of youth as a historical stage and individual process. As Harkema shows, youth constituted for Unamuno both a collective experience of historical time—related to the vibrancy and progressive development of a national culture as a form of Bildung—as well as a personal or vital condition, which he conceptualized as an individual spiritual dimension more specifically explored in his creative writings, including his well-known experimental fiction and his lesser-known poetry. Harkema connects the early development of Unamuno’s philosophical thinking on youth to Kantian and post-Kantian German philosophy (particularly as embodied in the work of Kant himself, Hegel, and Marx), and contemporary European politics related to the development of socialism. As explored by Harkema in this chapter—a must-read for scholars interested in theorizations of Iberianism during this period—Unamuno’s understanding of youth during the 1890s and early 1900s entails an idiosyncratic critique of modern nationalism, as embodied in the notions of casta and casticismo that permeated nationalist ideologies and political institutions of the Spanish state, as well as of some of the theological foundations of Spanish Catholicism. By recovering lesser-known works by Unamuno, (such as the novel Nuevo mundo, unpublished during his lifetime, as well as his early poetry, and the political essay “La ideocracia”—a philosophical critique of late nineteenth-century ideology), Harkema considerably expands previous understandings of Unamuno’s early work, particularly regarding his influential essay En torno al casticismo (1895). A central aspect of this first chapter is Harkema’s exploration of the question of nationalism in relation to both modernism and youth, particularly as the Basque writer critically engaged the role of Castille in the making of the modern Spanish nation-state—precisely at the time in which its global empire effectively crumbled in 1898—as well as in relation to the development of modern nationalism in Catalonia and the Basque country during this historical moment.

In chapter 2, “The Heroic Age,” Harkema traces Unamuno’s role and influence in the establishment of perhaps the most crucial academic and cultural institution developed in Spain during the second decade of the twentieth century, namely the Residencia, originally founded in Madrid in 1910. This chapter explores in detail how various contemporary theorizations of youth, among them Unamuno’s, generated an ideal of a new “heroic” age aimed at “embracing the radical potentiality of youth,” which became central to various institutional, educational, and political efforts by the group of intellectuals involved in the establishment of the Residencia de Estudiantes, as part of a wider sociopolitical attempt at the regeneration and formation of a new national spirit in Spain (93). As argued by Harkema, the institutional and ideological attempts to inspire the generation of a new youth around the institution...