Description:
ln matters of literature, periodization is always a perilous though unavoidable undertaking. Upon the numbing diversity of literary artefacts it seeks to impose the implacable orderliness of sequentiaI temporality, thereby reducing the overwheIming mass of literary output to an apprehensíble set of constructs. As the basic instrument of literary history, periodization has functioned as the princíple of a mode of subordinating and assembling that has gone far beyond the confines of scholarly speculations or even the much broader reach of textbooks, to structure general knowledge, or more precísely doxa (non-specifie opinion), about literature in our societies, as weIl as to provide the articulating mechanism for the internal organization of departments of literary studies in our universities.

Its very power in aIl of thèse realms has raised a series of concerns, ranging from a questioning of the subdivisions it effects to outright rejection. The strongest of the critiques is the one that has issued from within the Russian Formalist school which argued correctly that the prevailing mode of periodization was not grounded in literature but sought to impose upon it temporal sequences derived from other considerations, príncípally those of political, or at best, social, history. For the Formalists, such a mode of periodization rests upon the unfounded a priori assumption of causal links of determination between the social sphere and literature. They argued initially for the autonomy of the diverse spheres of human activity, including literature, each possessing its distinctive history, with relations of asynchronicity between the different spheres that would not readily admit reduction to easy or even mechanistic forms of causal determination.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini: The Course of Literature in Nineteenth-Century Spain...9

Chapter 1
Michael Nerlich: The Crisis of a Literary Institution Seen from Within (On a Parallel Reception of Voltaire and Chateaubriand in Spain)...35

Chapter 2
Jenaro Talens: The Collapse of Literature as Institutionalized Discourse:Espronceda’s El diablo mundo...67

Chapter 3
Luiz Costa Lima: The Space of Fiction and Reception of Don Quijote in Nineteenth-Century Spain...99

Chapter 4
Gwendolyn Barnes: The Power of the Word: Religious Oratory in Nineteenth-Century Spain...123

Chapter 5
Domingo Ynduráin: Galdós and the Generation of 1898...149

Chapter 6
Antonio Ramos-Gascón: Spanish Literature as a Historiographic Invention: The Case of the Generation of 1898 .......167

Chapter 7
José-Carlos Mainer: 1900-1910: New Literature, New Publics...195

Chapter 8
Vicente Cacho Viu: Catalonian Modernism and Cultural Nationalism...229

Chapter 9
René Jara: Literature and the Birth of a Nation: The Case of Chile...251

Chapter 10
Iris Zavala: Lyric Poetry at the Turn of the Century: Rubén Darío and the Sign of the Swan...279

APPENDIX:
Nancy J. Membrez: The Mass Production of Theater in Nineteenth-Century Madrid...309

Contributors...357

INDEX...361