POETISA CHIC: FASHIONING THE MODERN FEMALE POET IN CENTRAL AMERICA, 1929-1944

Abstract

This dissertation explores the cultural and literary "fashionings" of Central American female poets of the 1930s in order to demonstrate how some of these poets entered the lettered city (Ángel Rama's term for the nexus of the Latin American city, written discourse and political and social power), a metaphoric place still dominated by men at that time. Recent Central American cultural studies have found the 1930s to be a critical decade of dictatorships, nascent revolutionary movements, modernization, and foreign imperialism that sets the stage for the conflicts of the later twentieth century. My project takes part in this scholarship by attending to the significant increase in published female poets during this time. I recover their previously unstudied poetry and examine its participation in contemporary middlebrow aesthetics, theosophy, discussions of modernization, mestizaje, and social revolution. Close readings of women's poetry in relation to other cultural texts (such as photography, film, narrative, pedagogy, and state propaganda) demonstrate how literary criticism and cultural studies can work together to provide a richer view of literature's roles in both underpinning and undermining hegemonic views on gender relations.