This chapter discusses the question of cosmopolitanism and its role in the formation of the poetry of Modernismo, with a focus on the work of three major writers: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Amado Nervo, and José Juan Tablada. Using the notion of “strategic Occidentalism” – the deliberate and critical engagements of writers with the Western tradition – the chapter discusses the ways in which poets in the Modernismo tradition used specific literary genealogies to transition Mexican poetry into the twentieth century. The chapter also comments on the various available editions of the work of these poets.

The roots of Mexican poetry wend out from many traditions. Indigenous epic and lyric poetry survive in early modern works that simultaneously preserved and overwrote them. They subtly informed the practice of Mexican poetry in subsequent centuries and reemerged in full voice in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Diverse poetic practices stemming from both popular and learned traditions were introduced by Spaniards into Mexico over three centuries of viceregal rule in New Spain. European languages, ranging from classical to vernacular, brought their respective forms and traditions to the Mexican poetic radix: Latin and Greek; Italian and then – centrally – French; and later English, with the stems of Portuguese and German traditions grafted on.

This chapter underscores what I will call “Mexican Miracle Modernism”; that is, the emergence of literary forms and styles tied to the rapid population growth, economic modernization, and urban development that characterized the period. The key figure to be studied is Salvador Novo, whose work is often recovered in terms of his alternative sexuality and his role as chronicler. Building on those lines of inquiry, I will claim that he is in fact the precursor of a form of urban modernism that will become central in both fictional and nonfictional narratives from the 1960s onward. The chapter will also discuss the rise of the detective novel (Rodolfo Usigli, María Elvira Bermúdez, Antonio Helú, and Luis Spota will be key) and the importance of the Mexican gothic (Rafael Bernal and Francisco Tario).

This chapter underscores what I will call “Mexican Miracle Modernism”; that is, the emergence of literary forms and styles tied to the rapid population growth, economic modernization, and urban development that characterized the period. The key figure to be studied is Salvador Novo, whose work is often recovered in terms of his alternative sexuality and his role as chronicler. Building on those lines of inquiry, I will claim that he is in fact the precursor of a form of urban modernism that will become central in both fictional and nonfictional narratives from the 1960s onward. The chapter will also discuss the rise of the detective novel (Rodolfo Usigli, María Elvira Bermúdez, Antonio Helú, and Luis Spota will be key) and the importance of the Mexican gothic (Rafael Bernal and Francisco Tario).

Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution of 1857 or Leyes de Reforma, enacted by Mexican liberals in the midst of decades of strife and foreign intervention, remains one of the key political texts in the country’s history: “La soberanía nacional reside esencial y originariamente en el pueblo. Todo poder público dimana del pueblo y se instituye para su beneficio. El pueblo tiene en todo tiempo el inalienable derecho de alterar o modificar la forma de su gobierno” [National sovereignty resides essentially and originally in the people.

This chapter argues that the European utopian tradition was significantly transformed by Latin American essayists in the early twentieth century. The author focuses on the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes, whose works were crucial in defining the notion of “the New World” as a postcolonial space, as well as on José Vasconcelos’s widely read utopian essay La raza cósmica (1925).

From the outset, the James Bond film series was conceived as a runaway production. Bond-producer Harry Saltzman, a Canadian born in Quebec, relocated to the United Kingdom in the mid-1950s, where he founded Woodfall Film Productions with director Tony Richardson and writer John Osborne in 1958, famously engendering a wave of British Kitchen Sink classics such as Look Back in Anger (UK: Tony Richardson, 1959). In 1961, while at Woodfall, Saltzman secured an option on nine Bond novels from Ian Fleming but struggled to complete the financing for the films. It is at this stage that the second producer of the Bond film series, Albert R. Broccoli, an Italian-American hailing from New York, entered the picture. Broccoli moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1950s, setting up Warwick Films with Irving Allen in 1951. Warwick's base in the UK granted Broccoli and Allen the distinct benefits of a “runaway production:” it enabled the duo to circumvent the British quota requirement; to tap into the resources of the Eady Levy, a British fund that subsidized domestic film production through a tax imposed on ticket sales; to bypass tax regulations in the United States; to hire high-skilled laborers that were considerably cheaper than those available in Hollywood; and to retain creative freedom in the production process.

One of the commonplace notions in Latin American Transatlantic Studies is Alfonso Reyes's “Hispanism,” exemplified by the lifetime engagement of the prominent Mexican writer with the culture of Spain. The persistence of the idea of Reyes as a “Hispanist” is understandable if one considers the long-standing relationship between Reyes and Iberia, from his early exile in the 1910s and his presence in Jose Ortega y Gasset's circle in the 1920s, to his role in assisting Spanish intellectual exiles in Mexico in the 1940s and his lifelong interest in bringing authors like Gongora and Cervantes to Mexican and Latin American readers. Nevertheless, as I will argue in this short piece, this version of Reyes overlooks his notion of the Atlantic as a space not reducible to the relationship between Spain and Latin America, and the emergence of a sense of worldliness that showed the limits both of Hispanism as a cultural praxis in his work and of what I will call here a “transatlantic reason.” By this term, I refer to two things: the reification of colonial Atlantic circuits as the fundamental experience of the Atlantic—in this case the idea of the relationship with Spain as the core of the Atlantic experience of Latin America—and the emergence of a critical construct called “Transatlantic Studies” that seeks the continuation of the artificial symmetry between Iberian and Latin American Studies in the English-language academy by reducing Latin America's Atlantic experience to an intellectual agenda largely defined by Peninsular Spanish Studies. For the sake of concision, my remarks here will be limited to addressing the first question, since other essays of this collection engage the second point in detail and debate. I believe that Reyes's intellectual evolution proves important to thinking the category of the “Atlantic” for Hispanic Studies without falling back on a reductionist view based on the politics of academic knowledge. His work understands both Spain and Latin America to be part of richer circuits and networks. I will proceed in three steps. First, I will focus on Reyes's early writings on Spain, during his time there in the 1910s, to understand the way in which, early on, he “provincializes” Iberian culture.