Tides of Progress - by Peter Hulme & Ana Rodríguez Navas (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The first study of Anglo-Hispanic exchanges in print culturebetween the Spanish-American War and the Spanish Civil War, surfacing new archival materials to shed light on global modernities and regional interactions.

Tides of Progress studies the connections, interactions, and mutual appraisals between the Hispanic and Anglo spheres during a critical period in which print culture evolved from the province of the lettered few into a mass-media phenomenon. Print culture is increasingly gaining recognition as a fruitful area for literary study and literary history, and this volume's comparative approach significantly expands the scope of current scholarship.

Across all the main venues of the book - New York, Mexico City, San Juan, Buenos Aires, Kingston, Panama City, Guadalajara - periodicals flourished, borrowing and translating freely across linguistic boundaries. In some cases, they simply imported ideas; in others, they offered translated texts, ran columns in the other language, or even produced fully bilingual editions. Ideas of progress were reframed by translation, and they were often coded as 'modernity' in terms of consumer products or 'modernism' in literary texts, in contradistinction to more local forms such as literary modernismo.

Tides of Progress provides compelling insights into - and challenges assumptions about - some of the region's key literary figures while also surfacing significant new archival materials. The volume's authors collectively present print culture as becoming one of the most visible ways through which modernity and ideas of progress were encountered, consumed, shared, and assimilated by the public, in both the Anglo and Hispanic spheres.

Review Quotes

Tides of Progressdemonstrates the richness of periodicals as an archive of multilingual hemispheric exchanges that both reflected on modernity and in some sense produced it. This edited collection includes the best of both worlds: deep dives into particular periodicals and a sweeping scope of hemispheric comparativism through key concepts.
Catherine Keyser, Professor of English, University of South Carolina, USA

Tides of Progressis an impressive collection of scholarly work that crosses the Americas and takes a bilingual approach to print-culture studies. The articles cover a remarkable range of periodical publication, from advertisements in newspapers to literary magazines, and do so across various parts of the hemisphere. Attentive to questions of translation and transmission, this important collection is indispensable reading for anyone interested in print culture outside of nationalist frames.
Rodrigo Lazo, Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

This is a superb book that brings a fresh perspective upon the multifaceted periodical culture of the Anglo-Hispanic world. In a range of incisive essays we find an exciting picture of how complex notions of progress and modernity shaped Anglo-Hispanic exchanges in fascinating ways: this is a brilliant and essential collection for anybody working on modern periodical studies.
Andrew Thacker, Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University, UK

About the Author

Ana Rodríguez Navas is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Loyola University Chicago, USA. She is author of Idle Talk, Deadly Talk: The Uses of Gossip in Caribbean Literature (2018).

Peter Hulme is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at University of Essex, UK. His publications include The Dinner at Gonfarone's: Salomón de la Selva and His Pan-American Project in Nueva York, 1915-1919 (2019) and Red and Black in Harlem and Jamaica: The Revolutionary Life and Selected Writings of W. A. Domingo (2025; with Leslie James).