Manuel González Prada

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Manuel González Prada (1844-1918) was a Peruvian politician, literary critic and director of the National Library of Peru. He is well remembered as a social critic who helped develop Peruvian intellectual thought in the early twentieth century, as well as academic style known as modernismo.

Contents 1 Early life and literary contributions 2 The Question of Sources 3 Politics 4 References 5 Secondary bibliography

[edit] Early life and literary contributions

He was born in Lima to a wealthy family. He was an original partner in the Lima Literary Club and he participated in the foundation of the Peruvian Literary Circle, a vehicle to propose a Literature based on science and the future.His most famous book, Free Pages, caused a public outcry that brought González Prada dangerously close to excommunication from the Catholic Church. In fact González Prada was part of a group of social reformers that included Ricardo Palma, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera. These important authors were concerned with the enduring influence of Spanish colonialism in Peru. González Prada was perhaps the most radical of them all. The most radical work he published during his life time was Hours of Battle, translated as Hard Times.

Besides being a minor philosopher and a significant political agitator, González Prada is important as the first Latin American author to write in a style known as modernismo (modernista in Spanish, different from Anglo-American modernism) poet in Peru, anticipating some of the literary innovations that Rubén Darío would shortly bring to the entire Hispanic world. Besides his poetry, he cultivated the essay, and most recently Isabelle Tauzin Castellanos has published some of his hitherto unknown fiction. His intellectual and stylistic footprint can be found in the writing of Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, José Santos Chocano, Aurora Cáceres, César Vallejo, José Carlos Mariátegui and Mario Vargas Llosa.

[edit] The Question of Sources

To talk about González Prada’s sources and influences would be to write an encyclopedia of European and Latin American thought during his life time. Suffice to say that some of his major influences were Auguste Comte, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Ludwig Gumplowicz, Ernest Renan, Juan Montalvo, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mikhail Bakunin and many, many others. One way to put it--and perhaps oversimply it--is to say that González Prada was first a positivist following Auguste Comte, but that later in life, as he took up the working class's cause, he came closer and closer to thinkers such as Renan, Proudhon and Bakunin.

[edit] Politics

He was a member of the Civilista Party but left to found with his friends, a radical party known as the National Union. This party named him as a presidential candidate, but he fled to Europe following persecution. After the Pacific War, he returned to Peru in 1898. He stood as his party's Presidential Candidate in the Presidential election of 1899 and came third with 0.95% of the vote.

After his failure in the Presidential election he was asked to work for the newly formed government. He took up the post of director of the National Library of Peru, in the Abancay Avenue and helped to improve and reorganise the library to one of international stature. He died of a cardiac arrest on the 22nd of July 1918.

[edit] References

• His most important collections of essays and poetry

• González Prada, Free Pages and Hard Times: Anarchist Musings. Oxford University Press (2003). ISBN 0-19-511687-9 (hardcover) and ISBN 0-19-511688-7 (paperback).

[edit] Secondary bibliography

• Rufino Blanco Fombona, Grandes escritores de América, Madrid, 1917.
• Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez, La literatura política: De González Prada, Mariátegui y Haya de la Torre, Mexico, 1957, esp. pp. 51-125.
• Joël Delhom, "Ambiguités de la question raciale dans les essais de Manuel González Prada", en Les noirs et le discours identitaire latinoaméricain, Perpignan, 1997: 13-39.
• Efraín Kristal, Una visión urbana de los Andes: génesis y desarrollo del indigenismo en el Perú, 1848-1930, Lima, 1991.
• Robert G. Mead, Jr., Perspectivas interamericanas: literatura y libertad, New York, 1967, esp. pp. 103-184.
• Luis Alberto Sánchez, Nuestras vidas son los ríos…historia y leyenda de los González Prada, Lima, 1977.
• Isabelle Tauzin-Castellanos, ed., Manuel González Prada: escritor de dos mundos, Lima, 2006.
• Marcel Velázquez Castro, Las máscaras de la representación: el sujeto esclavista y las rutas del racismo en el Perú (1775-1895), Lima, 2005, esp. pp. 249-264.
• Thomas Ward, La anarquía inmanentista de Manuel González Prada. New York, 1998.
• Thomas Ward, " “González Prada, la mente y las manos”. Revista Peruana de Filosofía Aplicada, año 9, núm. 11 (1999): 46-54.
• Thomas Ward. “González Prada: soñador indigenista de la nación”, en su Resistencia cultural: La nación en el ensayo de las Américas, Lima, 2004: 160-177.