ABSTRACT
Modernism in Latin America presents a problem of nomenclature. The term modernismo was coined by Rubén Darío in his call for a new poetics at the turn of the twentieth century, and despite the fact that it is a direct cognate of ‘modernism’, it does not map directly onto Anglo-American modernisms. To talk of Latin American modernisms means to include both modernismo and the array of vanguard movements that take up a similar charge to reinvent, make new, and re-energize literary form in the modernist era. The artists and thinkers included here share affinities with their European modernist counterparts in their desire for art and literature to reflect and include the new reality of an industrial, mechanized world, through an artistic expression attuned to that changing cultural and historical scene.
