Incomparable Empires

Many historians treat the 1898 Spanish-American War as the moment when the United States rose to cultural dominance in the twentieth century, while Spain faded into a marginal presence in literary world affairs. Gayle Rogers questions this account, arguing that it rests on shaky premises, and he shows how major modernists in America and Spain reshaped these same stories at a formative time for modern literary studies. Tracing networks of writers, translators, and literary movements across both countries, he examines the debates that shaped modernism's politics and aesthetics.

Rogers looks at how empire operated, from its institutions to the ways it affected thinking itself, and how it helped form the literatures of both nations. His chapters move between universities and comparative methods. They cover Ezra Pound's unsuccessful effort to become a serious Hispanist and Juan Ramón Jiménez's multilingual maps of modernismo, along with the modernists' deep involvement in the founding ideas of American and Spanish literary studies, which often insisted on each nation's uniqueness.

The book also explores some surprising claims. John Dos Passos argued that American literature could thrive only if the expanding U.S. empire fell apart as Spain's had. Rogers also examines a debated proposal that linked Harlem, Havana, and Madrid as a single network for Black modernist writing, and he analyzes Ernest Hemingway's unconventional use of a cubist-inflected blend of Spanish and English in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Combining a rethinking of literary history with close readings of key texts, the book explains why foreign literatures held such importance for two countries undergoing rapid change at a decisive moment.