Madrid Modernista: Espacios Urbanos Madrilenos en la Literatura Bohemia del Modernismo Espanol

Abstract

This study offers an analysis of the interaction between urban spaces and bohemian literature in Madrid around 1900. I argue that bohemianism and bohemian literature are actually part of a very well structured cultural discourse--a discourse of social resistance--and must be studied as such. At the same time, the obvious urban nature of this phenomenon is a deciding aspect of it. In order to know how the bohemian discourse evolved in Madrid from 1850s to 1920s--from Realism to Modernismo--we have to study the core and reciprocal relationship between bohemianism and the city. This issue has not yet been explored within Hispanism, in spite of the fact that it provides a very useful perspective for considering the period as a synthesis of intellectual and artistic matters.In my dissertation I engage the essential aspects of bohemianism in the turn of the twentieth century Spanish literature. I focus on the characterization and use of space in the bohemian discourse of Peninsular Modernismo. My starting point is the description and characterization of such a discourse as it has been constructed, analyzing how it takes form in a variety of different kind of texts. I study the construction and evolution of its "cartographic imaginary" (David Harvey), an image of the city that bohemian literature uses to resist the bourgeois order imposed on Madrid's urban spaces and the capitalistic process that supports it. I argue that bohemianism was taken by the peninsular version of Hispanic Modernismo as its central aesthetic discourse. Consequently, and because of the subaltern and marginal nature of it, Modernismo could never position itself at the central stage of the 1900s Spanish culture.