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

In Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth, Leslie Harkema uses a relatively understudied corpus—Miguel de Unamuno’s first volume of poetry, Poesías (1907), and the seven-volume edition of his essays published by the Residencia de Estudiantes (Ensayos, 1916–1918)—to explore how the Basque writer’s conception of youth decisively shaped Spanish modernism. To put Unamuno at the center of the so-called Silver Age of Spanish letters helps to rethink established narratives about this fertile period by diverting attention from Juan Ramón Jiménez and José Ortega y Gasset. At the same time, it significantly expands our understanding of the rise of Europeanizing modernist movements in Spain by tracing surprising relationships between Unamuno’s concept of youth and the modernist cultural production of the late 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Moreover, Harkema’s nuanced consideration of modernism and youth deserves praise for focusing on poetry, a genre that has not received the attention it deserves in recent critical conversations in Hispanic studies.

In the introduction, Harkema lays out her argument by expanding on her concern for youth and the poetic:

I propose that Unamuno and his successors saw youth as a lyrical state that stood outside of history and cast a critical light on its ordering of events. For them, the power of youth was a poetic power, a capacity to resist or subvert the syllogistic logic of narrative progression (and of progress itself, in a positivistic sense), and to imagine alternative configurations of experience. While many of the works associated with a modernist treatment of youth belong to the prose genre of the Bildungsroman (one thinks of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Robert Musil’s Young Törless), in early twentieth-century Spain the link between art and youth is most prevalent in debates about poetry and the essence of “poetic” art.

(5)

This passage displays Harkema’s skills as a critic. In it she crafts a subtle argument, suggests a theory about youth’s critical power that is grounded in the close reading of literary texts, and traces meaningful connections between Spanish cultural production of the Silver Age and the main tendencies of European modernism.

For these and other reasons, Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth is a brilliant addition to the growing number of studies that have enriched our view of the Edad de Plata, a crucial period in Spain’s modern experience that was famously put on the critical map by José-Carlos Mainer in his 1975 classic La Edad de Plata (1902–1939). Much like Roberta Johnson’s Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel (2003), Andrew Anderson’s El veintisiete en tela de juicio (2005), Maite Zubiaurre’s Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898–1939 (2012), and Juan Herrero-Senés’s Mensajeros de un tiempo nuevo (2014), Harkema’s elegantly written book offers fresh insights into some of the central figures, themes, institutions, and critical categories of the period.

Harkema’s corpus and methodology, however, fall more in line with the projects of Anderson and Herrero-Senés than those of Johnson and Zubiaurre. Unlike Johnson, whose focus on gender allowed her to uncover the social perspective exemplified by Spanish modernist women writers—Carmen de Burgos, Sofía Casanova, Blanca de los Ríos, Concha Espina, Margarita Nelken, Federica Montseny, Rosa Chacel, and María Zambrano—Harkema’s corpus is centered on Unamuno and on authors such as José Moreno Villa, Gerardo Diego, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and José Bergamín. According to Harkema, this choice stems from the fact that at the time youthfulness “was by and large only available to men” and that “rarely in their work do they [female writers] thematize youth as the men can and do” (23). While it is true that female writers rarely...