Controversy and tradition. Literary field incidence in two anthologies by Xavier Villaurrutia

Abstract

The Mexican literary field after the Revolución mexicana finds a configuration process in front of the new political, social, and intellectual situation. Soon would start a controversy between two positions of literary conceptions -with two terms as controversial: virile literature and effeminate literature- in 1925 and another alike seven years later, in 1932, when the idea of national literature is questioned considering the ideals from the civil warfare before the foreign avant-garde-influenced ideas looking for a universal and cosmopolitan understanding. As participants in both times, the Contemporáneos group postulates their aesthetic ideas in their homonymous magazine, as well as the individual efforts of their members to reaffirm their position, among them there is the input from Xavier Villaurrutia who publishes poem anthologies from two recognized Mexican authors: Ramón López Velarde and sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Villaurrutia employs dispositives based upon his critical texts to elaborate these compilations aspiring to propose a Mexican literary tradition before the possibility to form the new defining literary field for the rest of the XX century.