Incomparable Empires

Reviews / Votes

Gayle Rogers develops a complex and nuanced literary history of political, institutional, and aesthetic transformations through translation across two empires. Incomparable Empires is an immense achievement for global and comparative modernist studies. -- Joshua L. Miller, author of <i>Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism</i> By de-coupling their translational practices from the national literary traditions and imperial teleologies they were supposed to express and reflect, the writers analyzed in Incomparable Empires carved out creative spaces that radically reconfigured U.S. and Spanish literatures. Rogers's brilliantly contextualized recovery of their alternative stratagems of translation promises to foster a grand scale re-thinking of the formation, structure, and purposes of our extant comparative literary histories of the early twentieth century. -- Donald E. Pease, author of <i>The New American Exceptionalism</i> Taking the Jamesonian view of imperialism in unexpected and original directions, Rogers explores the rivalry of the Spanish and U.S. empires at the intersection of modernism and translation. This volume achieves what one would have thought possible only from several books, namely writing a new history of two fields traditionally considered to be unrelated: Hispanism and American studies. -- Cesar Dominguez, coauthor of <i>Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications</i> A groundbreaking contribution to such transnational fields as global modernism and world literature studies. -- Alejandro Mejias-Lopez, author of <i>The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism</i> Rogers has written a superlative examination of modernismo's cultural and literary production. . . . Essential. * CHOICE * Rogers's book, published in Jessica Berman and Paul Saint-Amour's relatively recent and already excellent Modernist Latitudes series at Columbia University Press, constitutes an important intervention in the reshaping of modernist studies. . . . Rogers should be lauded due to the extreme coherence, timeliness, and significance of his project, especially considering the uneven status of Spanish literature of this period within Anglophone academia today. -- Ignacio Infante * Modernism/modernity * The historian will find in this work a novel perspective on the relationship between Spain and the United States post-1898; students of Hispanic and American literature will benefit from an in-depth analysis of how these two empires influenced each other and shaped their canons; and translation scholars will delight in further proof that translation and its history provides crucial insight into the way cultures have understood, and continue to understand, each other. -- Owen Harrington Fernandez * Literature and Translation * Rogers uses a compelling combination of first-rate historical scholarship and forensic close reading to probe much more deeply into the imbrications of US and Spanish modernisms. -- Peter Hulme * Bulletin of Hispanic Studies * Bursting at the seams with innovative insights, Incomparable Empires will make readers think in new ways about modernism, translation, and the often-neglected ties between North American and Spanish literature. -- Jose Luis Venegas * Hispanofila * Incomparable Empires is a brilliant work of comparative criticism, animated by contemporary critical concerns, and it is erected on a solid foundation of research and erudition. It also provides a wealth of information, and its clear, jargon-free prose makes it accessible to a wide range of readers. -- Gustavo Pellon * MLN * The archaeological journey on which Incomparable Empires takes its readers and the instructiveness of its layered content make the study a worthwhile read. * Hispania * Incomparable Empires represents an important contribution to US scholarship on modernism for the way it decenters the Anglophone tradition and mobilizes the concept of incommensurability to insist on linguistic and cultural specificity even within a network of transatlantic exchange. * Revista Hispanica Moderna * The possibilities of plural voices in translation and bilingual writing is deeply impressive in [Rogers's] reading. * The Year's Work in English Studies *