| "Ugarte examines the various conceptions of Madrid as a physical, political, and social entity, and the ways it influenced the lives and the texts of writers at the turn of the century. . . . What emerges is a multifarious, organic image of the city as a space built on institutionalized discourses, which at the same time allows for bohemia and challenges to the status quo. This work includes the necessary background to engage the general reader, and sophisticated insights that will appeal to specialists in Spanish literature and culture and to feminist critics."-Choice
"Michael Ugarte's study of Madrid as a place to which writers migrated at the turn of the century, as well as a subject of their writing, forges a new direction in twentieth-century Peninsular studies. By focusing on Madrid at an important moment for the psychology of cultural consciousness, Ugarte is able to fuse a sophisticated materialism with subtle textual analyses. Ugarte's work is a major contribution that will be of primary interest to scholars of Hispanism, feminist authors, and general readers interested in Madrid and/or the coming millennium."-Roberta Johnson, The University of Kansas
Madrid 1900 assesses the cultural history of Madrid and its relation to the cultural history of Spain through examining the literature written in and on Madrid at the turn of the nineteenth century. The center of Spanish national identity, turn-of-the-century Madrid offered a haven for young writers to try out their ideas and launch their careers. Ugarte traces the history of this writerly consciousness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, combining historical, biographical, and literary sources.
He understands Madrid as a specific urban landscape and political entity that shaped the lives and writings of a number of writers. The writers discussed do not fall into the traditional literary categories of the "Generation of 1898" or "Generation of 1914," concepts that Ugarte argues forcefully against. His arrangement, centered on space rather than time, allows him to discuss canonical writers (Pío Baroja, Ramon Maria del Valle-Inclan, and Azorin) alongside vanguardists (Ramon Gomez de la Serna). Ugarte devotes special attention to the representation of women in urban space and includes an ignored woman writer, Carmen de Burgos, in his broader discussion of the important writers of the period. Ugarte reads each of these writers as incarnations of specific patterns and images of urban representation, such as sociological reform, women in the city, the linguistic subversion of city objects, Bohemian culture, and the conflict between the country and the city.
The major theoretical underpinnings of the study center on a wedding of historical and biographical information to textual analyses. Ugarte draws on ideas and models from a variety of theorists ranging from Marxists and New Historicists to theorists of narratology. Of particular timeliness as we approach a new century, Madrid 1900 gives special consideration to the cultural transition from an old century to a new one and how the re-creation of a city-any city-contributes to the formation of consciousness. |
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