Outbreaks of Satanism in Venezuelan Poetry of the Turn of the Century (1896-1933)

Dissidences and Reinventions between Decadentism and the Avant-Gardes

Abstract

This work presents a historical-critical approach to the satanic impulses present in Venezuelan poetry from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In a panorama that encompasses key moments of country’s early literary modernity, or from Decadentism to the Avant-garde, it becomes evident how evocations of Satan function as a critical device against the police discourses of the period (Rancière), as an ‘image-text’ (Mitchell) that questions values identified with the bourgeois class, and as an ideologeme that challenges conventional ideas about bodies (both male and female). With Lucifer, it is concluded, Venezuelan poetry is devoted to a consecration of the Dionysian from which a heterogeneous and dissensual look is obtained regarding the historical present in which it is enunciated.