Properties of Modernity

Romantic Spain, Modern Europe, and the Legacies of Empire

Michael Iarocci

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780826515223
  9780826515216
• eBook ISBN:
  9780826592118
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

Michael Iarocci traces the ways in which Spain went from being central to European history and identity during the early modern period to being marginalized and displaced by England, France, and Germany during the Romantic period. He points out that it has long been an unspoken assumption tainting much of literary criticism that Spain did not have a strong Romantic movement even though Spain itself had come to be viewed by the "new" Europe as the location of all that was romantic.

Through a close study of Cadalso, Saavedra, and Larra, Iarocci argues that Spanish writers were intensely concerned with the same issues taken up by more famous Romantics and that the ways in which they address these issues provides us with a richer notion, not only of Spain, but of all of Europe.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. From the Narratives of the Modernity to Spanish Romanticism
• 2. Beginnings without End
• 3. Rethinking the Modern in Saavedra’s Don Alvaro
• 4. Late Larra, or Death as Critique
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index