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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 to 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 contemporaneas, or novels of contemporary customs, and
therefore primarily concerned with faithfully copying and moreover
influencing real social norms in the public sphere. In these pages,
I argue 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 Ramon de Mesonero Romanos,
Ildefons Cerda and Carlos Maria 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 the 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 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 fields such as etiquette and urban
planning, or literature and touristic discourse.
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