"In The Routes of Modernity Andrew Bush challenges and revises received notions of the origins and development of modern poetry in Spanish America. With comprehensive historical knowledge and theoretical sophistication, this book provides a new model of modernity in terms of an emerging historical consciousness and its vicissitudes, elaborated by reference to a cogently articulated philosophy of history and a psychoanalytic theory of mourning and melancholia.".

"In a recanonization that surpasses the usual belletristic assumptions, Bush argues for the historical, literary, and social importance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish American poetry in a discussion whose broad purview is signaled by his reading of the continent-wide poetic anthology America poetica (1846), which is the focal point of his conclusions.

These arguments are based on the analysis of a wide range of specific texts, including poetry from indigenous and popular cultures, journalistic settings, and other previously neglected sources. In his reassessment of the period, Bush provides a thoroughly revised foundation for the study of the modernistas."--BOOK JACKET.