"'Ariel,' like Arnold's 'Culture and Anarchy' and Emerson's 'American Scholar,' is a key text in the longstanding
debate concerning culture and democratization."
--New York Times Book Review
"Irritating, insufferable, admirable, stimulating, disappointing Rodó: . . . you are part of our family
quarrels, and must bear with your disrespectful, equally disappointed, intuitive, incomplete nephews, living in
a world that you helped define for us, and offered unto our revolt."
--from the Prologue by Carlos Fuentes
University of Texas Press Web Site, August, 2002
Summary
First published in 1900 Uruguay, Ariel is Latin America's most famous essay on esthetic and philosophical sensibility,
as well as its most discussed treatise on hemispheric relations. Though Rodó protested the interpretation,
his allegorical conflict between Ariel, the lover of beauty and truth, and Caliban, the evil spirit of materialism
and positivism, has come to be regarded as a metaphor for the conflicts and cultural differences between Latin
America and the United States. Generations of statesmen, intellectuals, and literary figures have been formed by
this book, either in championing its teachings or in reacting against them. This edition of Ariel, prepared especially
with teaehers and students in mind, contains a reader's guide to names, places, and important movements, as well
as notes and a comprehensive annotated English/Spanish bibliography.
