Urban Spaces, Gendered Places: Women, City & Modernity in Late 19th- & Turn-Of-The-Century Spain

3 units

This course will examine the representations of the city in the literature of late nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century Spain, focusing on the ways in which the cultural history of the city is linked to the production of gendered spaces in moment of uneven and uneasy transition to modernity. Through a close analysis of texts by authors from Galdós and Pardo Bazán, to Baroja and Carmen de Burgos, we will explore women's shifting and unstable place in the emergent consumer society of urban Spain, and their impact on the construction of a modern urban identity and national consciousness. The significance of these gendered spaces will be considered from the viewpoints of diverse groups of women who inhabited the city: the bourgeois angel of the house, working-class women, prostitutes, the bohemian flaneuse, among others. From these viewpoints, we will attempt to construct a feminist counter-discourse that vies to undermine the dominant tropes of a masculinized urban modernity.