Benito Perez Galdos has been described as 'the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes.' His work constitutes a major contribution to the nineteenth-century novel, rivalling that of Dickens of Balzac and making him an essential candidate for any course on the fiction of the period. Jo Labanyi's study is supported by a wide-rangting introduction, a section of contemporary comment, headnotes to each piece and helpful appendix material.
Although Spain is a country which has always had a great attraction for English-speaking people, Spanish novelists are very little known to them. Yet Pérez Galdós is not only the most popular of writers in Spain, whose books are a household word among his countrymen, but he is a major European novelist who ranks with Balzac Dostoevsky and Dickens. In THE SPENDTHRIFTS (LA DE BRINGAS) the scene is laid in the Royal Palace at Madrid, where Bringas and his wife hold minor posts at the court of Queen Isabella. Rosalía Bringas is a woman whose passion for dress leads her steadily deeper into debt and who is obliged to resort to more and more ludicrous and precarious devices to conceal her extravagance from a model bureaucrat of a husband. Her friend the Marquesa de Tellería is in a similar plight, while Doña Cándida, a superb parasite and bore, has already reached the end of the same downward path. The rottenness of the whole regime becomes apparent and when, at the close of a sweltering summer, the Army, the Navy and the entire country rise with one accord and the Queen flees to France, the curtain falls on this phantasmagoric society, so brilliant when viewed from the outside but built on poverty and debt and emptiness. Thus THE SPENDTHRIFTS is both an allegory of the ending classes of Spain and a sermon on the classic Spanish theme, made familiar to us in DON QUIXOTE, of illusions and reality.
Applying recent European and Anglo-American feminist scholarship to the problems of gender representation, Charnon-Deutsch challenges the prevailing idea that the 19th-century Spanish novel is woman centered. The author's examination of novels by Valera, Pereda, Alas, and Galdos demonstrates that these works are instead a complex exploration of male identity. Decoding the gender ideology of women's roles, discourse, and representations, Charnon-Deutsch uncovers in the novels multiple configurations of androcentricity as well as voyeuristic tendencies, which she interprets as a means of mastering what is threatening to the male psyche.
Cover -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter One: Fashioning Womanhood and Making Modernity in Galdós's La desheredada -- Chapter Two: What Is a Man of Fashion? Manuel Pez and the Dandy in Galdós's La de Bringas -- Chapter Three: Fashion and Feminity in Pardo Bazán's Insolación -- Chapter Four: The Sartorial Charm of the Modern Man in Pardo Bazán's Insolación -- Chapter Five: Dressing the New Woman in Picón's Dulce y sabrosa -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Book -- About the Author.
This novel is set in 1860s Spain. This is the story of a snobbish, mean-spirited, petite, bourgeois woman, married to an incredible cheapskate fifteen years her senior. Dona Rosalia Bringas has expensive tastes and buys extravagant dresses on credit. Her indebtedness is furthered by unscrupulous friends who use her shamelessly for their own purposes. The novel is an allegory on the corruption of the Spanish ruling classes.
Not easily translated, the Spanish terms cursi and cursilería refer to a cultural phenomenon widely prevalent in Spanish society since the nineteenth century. Like "kitsch," cursi evokes the idea of bad taste, but it also suggests one who has pretensions of refinement and elegance without possessing them. In The Culture of Cursilería, Noël Valis examines the social meanings of cursi, viewing it as a window into modern Spanish history and particularly into the development of middle-class culture. Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs to argue that cursilería has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering from nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class exaggerated their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting manifestations of cursilería were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was—and still is—closely associated with a sense of home. Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilería embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity. The Culture of Cursilería will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.
Despite its international significance, Madrid has been almost entirely ignored by urban, literary and cultural studies published in English. A Cultural History of Madrid: Modernism and the Urban Spectacle corrects that oversight by presenting an urban and cultural history of the city from the turn of the century to the early 1930s. Between 1900 and 1930, Madrids population doubled to almost one million, with less than half the population being indigenous to the city itself. Far from the Castilian capital it was made out to be, Madrid was fast becoming a socially magnetic, increasingly secular and cosmopolitan metropolis. Parsons explores the interface between elite, mass and popular culture in Madrid while considering the construction of a modern madrileo identity that developed alongside urban and social modernization. She emphasizes the interconnection of art and popular culture in the creation of a metropolitan personality and temperament. The book draws on literary, theatrical, cinematic and photographic texts, including the work of such figures as Ramn Mesonero Romanos, Benito Prez Galds, Po Baroja, Ramn Gomez de la Serna, Ramn Valle-Incln and Maruja Mallo. In addition, the author examines the development of new urban-based art forms and entertainments such as the zarzuela, music halls and cinema, and considers their interaction with more traditional cultural identities and activities. In arguing that traditional aspects of culture were incorporated into the everyday life of urban modernity, Parsons shows how the boundaries between high and low culture became increasingly blurred as a new identity influenced by modern consumerism emerged. She investigates the interaction of the geographical landscape of the city with its expression in both the popular imagination and in aesthetic representations, detailing and interrogating the new freedoms, desires and perspectives of the Madrid modernista.
The Franciscan mission San José de Tumacácori and the perennially undermanned presidio Tubac become John L. Kessell's windows on the Arizona–Sonora frontier in this colorful documentary history. His fascinating view extends from the Jesuit expulsion to the coming of the U.S. Army. Kessell provides exciting accounts of the explorations of Francisco Garcés, de Anza's expeditions, and the Yuma massacre. Drawing from widely scattered archival materials, he vividly describes the epic struggle between Bishop Reyes and Father President Barbastro, the missionary scandals of 1815–18, and the bloody victory of Mexican civilian volunteers over Apaches in Arivaipa Canyon in 1832. Numerous missionaries, presidials, and bureaucrats—nameless in histories until now—emerge as living, swearing, praying, individuals. This authoritative chronicle offers an engrossing picture of the continually threatened mission frontier. Reformers championing civil rights for mission Indians time and again challenged the friars' "tight-fisted paternalistic control" over their wards. Expansionists repeatedly saw their plans dashed by Indian raids, uncooperative military officials, or lack of financial support. Frairs, Soldiers, and Reformers brings into sharp focus the long, blurry period between Jesuit Sonora and Territorial Arizona.
