Madrid's Forgotten Avant-Garde explores the role played by artists and intellectuals who constructed and disseminated various competing images of national identity that polarized Spanish society prior to the Civil War. The convergence of modern and essentialist discourses and practices, especially in literature and poetry--in what is conventionally called in Spanish letters the Generation of '27--created fissures between competing views of aesthetics and ideology that cut across political affiliation. Author Silvina Schammah Gesser exposes the paradoxes facing Madrid's cultural...