 | Pueblos Enfermos: The Discourse of Illness in the Turn-of-the-Century Spanish and Latin American Essay Subjects: National characteristics Latin American; National characteristics Spanish; Mental illness in literature; Ganivet Angel 1865-1898. Idearium español; Rodâ Josâ Enrique 1871-1917. Ariel; Arguedas Alcides 1879-1946. Pueblo enfermo; Spanish American es; This book investigates three examples of the turn-of-the-century essay in Spain and Latin America: Angel Ganivet's Idearium espanol (1897), Jose Enrique Rodo's Ariel (1900), and Alcides Arguedas's Pueblo enfermo (1909). Michael Aronna traces the reactions of these historically and rhetorically related colonial and postcolonial thinkers to the new economic, cultural, social, and political challenges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He shows how concepts of sexual degeneration, racial inferiority, immaturity, and gender prominent in contemporary philosophy and science were central to these writers' shared understanding of the nation as an organism vulnerable to "social pathogens." |
