Erotic Mysticism: Subversion and Transcendence in Latin American Modernista Prose

Modernismo, Latin America's first homegrown literary movement, has garnered critical attention for its political and social import during a time of intense nation building and efforts to propel the region into modernity. LaGreca's Erotic Mysticism explores two dominant discourses of the period, Catholicism and positivism, which sought to categorize and delimit the desires and behaviors of the ideal citizen. These discourses, LaGreca argues, were powerful because each promised to allay the individual's existential fears. Yet the coexistence of these two competing ideologies, one atheistand one religious, sowed doubt and unease in the modern intellectual who sought an alternative mode of understanding the human condition. From these uncertainties sprang a seductively liberating mode of writing: nontheistic erotic mysticism.