The sentimental, the massive, the rebellious: the poetesses and the public in post-centenary Argentina

Abstract

Between 1918 and 1921, five books were published in Argentina that are essential to think about the relationship between poetry, gender and market during the first decades of the 20th century. To the classics El dulce daño (1918), Irremediablemente (1919) and Languidez (1920), which made Alfonsina Storni a popular author, we can add Las lenguas de diamante (1918) and Raíz salvaje (1921), by Juana by Ibarbourou. All of them explore the conformation of an emerging feminine subjectivity that intersects sentimentality, sexuality and modernity through a deviant use of late-modernist rhetoric. It was this junction, precisely, the point of intersection that allowed them to connect with the public in a way unknown until then, massive and rebellious at the same time. This article addresses this link and the coordinates from which these writers found a new mode of female authorship, which not only reformulated the images and expectations that circulated about women authors of the time, but also the public spaces where they participated, the scope of their writings and their general relationship with the literary field.