British modernism and Ortega's Spanish vanguard : Cosmopolitan visions of Europe, 1922--1939.

This dissertation reconstructs a critical dialogue between British modernists and their Spanish contemporaries on their shared sense of the urgent tasks, in the wake of World War I, of reimagining the cultural heritage of Europe and cultivating cosmopolitan sensibilities. It assembles and analyzes a network of novels, essays, translations, reviews, and correspondence grounded in the collaboration between T.

S. Eliot's journal The Criterion (1922--39) and Jose Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente [Review of the West] (1923--36). Against the reigning insular trends of British and Spanish national cultures, this network provided an intellectual and material framework for circulating the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Stephen Spender, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Ortega in order to reclaim an endangered ideal of Europe. In particular, these authors aligned aspects of their renovations of the Enlightenment cosmopolitan tradition with the political and cultural modernization of Spain. As Spain transformed itself from Europe's forgotten margin to the epicenter of its battle against fascism in the 1930s, critics such as Antonio Marichalar, a translator and contributor to both Eliot's and Ortega's journals, integrated an Anglo-Spanish body of thought on "Europe" that nationalist rhetoric had provincialized. My study brings together Marichalar's work on Joyce's Ulysses (1922) with Anglophone postcolonial criticism to show how Molly Bloom connects Spain and Ireland to one another and to a new Europe. I argue that Spender's translation of Lorca's Poems (1939) subverts British efforts to make Lorca a martyr for communism by reading him as a poet of a continent that has rediscovered its Spanish heritage. Analyzing Woolf's engagement with the Spanish Civil War in Three Guineas (1938), I outline her vision of an intellectual space for feminist cosmopolitanism that provided a model for her Argentinean colleague Victoria Ocampo and Ortega's exiled student Maria Zambrano. My study argues for an understanding of modernism as an integral part of an international political-aesthetic effort both to reform notions of cosmopolitanism and to reconfigure the borders of "Europe" through Spain.