Este ensayo expone los puentes comunicantes entre la estilística de las obras de dos autores modernistas: Julián del Casal y Delmira Agustini, y el contexto cultural y los mores sexuales de fines del siglo XIX. Las  dinámicas sociales de la vida nocturna expansiva, el sensacionalismo pandémico de la prensa amarilla, el creciente interés sobre la homosexualidad y la incursión de la mirada femenina en las letras, todo confluirá con ciertos preceptos del romanticismo tardío y el simbolismo para darle voz y formas de expresión inéditas a sexualidades alternativas de la época. El alejamiento del sentimentalismo y la pose “malditista” de los modernistas empalma con nuevas representaciones del deseo; el enrarecimiento del objeto como axioma simbolista inspirará el enrarecimiento de un objeto emergente: el del cuerpo masculino, y la insinuación de una nueva mirada: la de la mujer y la del desviado. / This essay shed light over the connection between the literary style from the works of two “modernistas” authors: Julián del Casal and Delmira Agustini, and the cultural contexts and sexual mores at the end of the 19th century. The social dynamics of the ever expansive night life, the lurid and ubiquitous tabloids of the time and the growing interests towards deviant sexual behaviors and women’s perspective in books, everything will align with certain guideline of the late Romanticism and Symbolism to shape new voices and expressions of desire. The Modernistas’ retraction from sentimentalism and their maudit pose suit the remodeling of the sexual; the rarified object from the symbolist axiom dictates an evermore rarified new object: the one of the male body and its locus in the nascent representation of women’s and deviants’ libidos.

This dissertation studies the cultural concept of “decadence” in Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth century. It focuses on the reception of Cuban writer Julián del Casal (1863-1893) as an emblematic case. It approaches “decadence” in literary, sociological and historical terms, and relates its emergence (as cultural concept) to the legitimation crisis of colonialism brought about by the advent of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. The dissertation presents a comparative study of the relationship between fin de siècle and the twentieth century categorizations of the "decadent" and "degenerate" artist. Julián del Casal is analyzed as a cornerstone for such debates in three interrelated spheres: literary criticism in pre-Independence Cuba, including discussions on nationhood, art, culture, and literature; Latin American modernismo criticism, in particular the debates among writers and critics on the role of literature in fin-de-siècle Latin America; and twentieth-century literary reformulations of “decadence” among writers associated with the journal Orígenes. The dissertation combines theoretical approaches on the sociology of literature, cultural and Transatlantic theories of “decadence”, and close readings of archival material. This dissertation makes a contribution to bridging the gap between literary and cultural approaches to “decadence” as both a literary strategy and a cultural and political phenomenon. It asserts that, in order to understand the significance of “decadence” in Cuba and in the rest of Latin America, it is important to go beyond traditional approaches, which have circumscribed the study of “decadence” to the nineteenth-century, and have treated it merely as an aesthetic phenomenon. Instead, the dissertation highlights the significance of this concept, in the study of twentieth-century literature and politics, as a tool to revisit the impact of colonialism and nation-formation in Latin America.