BiblioVault - Books about Modern Spain

Confessions of the Letter Closet

Epistolary Fiction and Queer Desire in Modern Spain

Patrick Paul Garlinger

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

By the beginning of the twentieth century, epistolary novels in Spain increasingly grappled with homoerotic and homosexual desire, treating it as a secret communicated through private letters from one reader to another. Patrick Paul Garlinger reveals how this confidential model persists in these fictions of letter writing from the early twentieth century to the present, framing expressions of queer desire in confessional terms: secrecy, guilt, morality, and shame.Confessions of the Letter Closet draws on queer theory and psychoanalysis, archival research on letter writing as a social practice and on the advent of the postal system in Spain, and historical insights into the impact of Spanish laws regarding the inviolability of correspondence on epistolary fiction. Garlinger examines how the epistolary novel represents - and is implicated in - the homophobia and psychic ambivalence around sexuality and identity with which Spanish gays and lesbians struggle, despite significant legal advances and increased social tolerance.Addressing both male and female desire and drawing links to epistolary traditions outside of Spain, Confessions of the Letter Closet goes beyond the specifics of Spanish literature to contribute more broadly to queer theory, the study of epistolary fiction, and an understanding of autobiography and confessional discourse.

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The Culture of Cursilería

Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain

Noel Valis

Duke University Press, 2002

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.

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The Development of Modern Spain

An Economic History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Gabriel Tortella

Harvard University Press, 2000

This reinterpretation of the history of modern Spain from the Enlightenment to the threshold of the twenty-first century explains the surprising changes that took Spain from a backward and impoverished nation, with decades of stagnation, civil disorder, and military rule, to one of the ten most developed economies in the world. The culmination of twenty years' work by the dean of economic history in Spain, founder of the Revista de Historia Económica and recipient of the Premio Rey Juan Carlos, Spain's highest honor for an academic, the book is rigorously analytical and quantitative, but eminently accessible. It reveals views and approaches little explored until now, showing how the main stages of Spanish political history have been largely determined by economic developments and by a seldom mentioned factor: human capital formation. It is comparative throughout, and concludes by applying the lessons of Spanish history to the plight of today's developing nations.

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The Sublime South

Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain

Jose Luis Venegas

Northwestern University Press, 2018

The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain is the first systematic study on cultural images of Andalusia as Spain’s “Orient” and the impact they have had on nation-building and modernization since the late nineteenth century. While a wealth of studies have examined how northern Europeans from the Romantic period viewed Spain and Andalusia as Europe’s Orient, little attention has been paid to how contemporary Spanish artists and intellectuals assimilated Romantic legacies to engage in an internal form of orientalism.

José Luis Venegas deftly explores Spain’s shifting engagements with oriental identity and otherness by looking, not just beyond national, ethnic, and racial borders, but at a territory that is institutionally embedded in the nation-state while symbolically placed between inclusion and abjection. The Sublime South shifts the focus and scale of Edward Said’s notion of orientalism by examining how it evolves and manifests transnationally, as the result of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and intra-nationally, in a European yet orientalized country. Finally, Venegas challenges ethnocentric notions of Iberian cultures and fosters an understanding of the encounters between Western and Muslim cultures beyond opposing, and often mutually negating, essentialisms.

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