Urbanism and urbanity : the Spanish bourgeois novel and contemporary customs (1845-1925) / Leigh Mercer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mercer, Leigh, 1971-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Middle class in literature.

Spanish fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

Spanish fiction.

Spanish fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Manners and customs in literature.

Social values in literature.

City and town life in literature.

Group identity in literature.

Literature and society--Spain--History.

Literature and society.

History.

Spain.

Physical Description:

xi, 201 pages ; 24 cm

Other Title:

Spanish bourgeois novel and contemporary customs (1845-1925)

Place of Publication:

Lewisburg [Pa.] : Bucknell University Press ; Lanham, Md. : Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Pub., [2013]

Summary:

Through the study of more than twenty novels produced in Spain from the 1840s to the 1920s, this book explores the literary means by which the social options available to modern Spanish bourgeois citizens were discursively constructed, occasionally before and often concomitantly with their production in reality. As a result, this study is concerned with the interplay of realism and reality in modern Spain. From the earliest folletines of the 1840s to the Modernist novels of the 1920s, the majority of novels written in this eighty-year period are what one might term novelas de costumbres contemporáneas, or novels of contemporary customs and are therefore primarily concerned with faithfully copying, and moreover influencing, real social norms in the public sphere.

In these pages, Leigh Mercer argues that the spatial and behavioral discourses in the novels of contemporary customs offer a telling history of the evolving formulation of the Spanish bourgeoisie. The linking of novels and urbanism is hardly arbitrary in the context of nineteenth-century Spain. Urbanism, particularly in the nineteenth century, was as much a verbal construction as the novel, as proven by the lengthy treatises of such prominent Spanish bureaucrats, engineers, architects, and urban planners as Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Ildefons Cerdá, and Carlos María de Castro. For Spanish intellectuals of this era, city planning and the novel functioned as parallel, enmeshed discourses in which to work out what it meant to be middle class and which roles this class ought to play in contemporary society. In this way, they can be considered associated fields of discourse in the sense described by Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault's treatise was a call for scholars to reexamine historical fields and question the historical grouping of knowledge(s) into certain discursive unities, and also to consider whether these might be broken up and new ones conceived. In this vein, this book undertakes a broader and more integrative view of the Spanish nineteenth century, calling into question the boundaries of such fields as etiquette and urban planning or literature and touristic discourse. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

All the world's her stage: the museum and the theater

Consuming desires: the boutique and the promenade

The games men play: the stock market and the casino

Fields of honor: political clubs, congress, and dueling grounds

Afterword: defining spaces in modern Spain.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611483888

1611483883

9781611483895

1611483891

OCLC:

806017650