Nineteenth-Century French Studies

The imitation and adaptation of Gautier's enamel-and-cameo poetics by American poets, in particular by French Canadians and Latin Americans, reveal the inherent craftiness of a poetic craft whose irrelevancies and foreignness became relevant and local. By reviewing Octavio Paz's analysis of el modernismo, and by examining the Premières poésies (1878) of the Québécois poet Eudore Evanturel and the immediate rejection of this poetry by the literary institution of his time and place, my study shows the slipperiness between claims (or charges) of aesthetic autonomy, disengagement, complicity, and opposition. (CGS)