This thesis will examine literary representations of the city of Madrid from the late sixteenth to seventeenth century, with a specific focus on the period of 1600-‐1650. My analysis incorporates a multi-‐genre approach that will include historiography, ephemeral text, festival books, poetry, entremés and prose fiction in order to provide the widest consideration of early modern Madrid through the literature it produced. Several scholars of Golden Age Madrid, such as Garcia Santo-Tomás, Elliott, and Romero-Díaz, have highlighted the need to move away from the static Maravallian dichotomy of power and resistance by which the Baroque has been characterised, and towards an approach that instead examines it from a point of view of its dynamism. The literature of early modern Madrid presents a conflictive image of both attraction and repugnance. On the one hand, there is an ‘official’ discourse of the city that looks to the court as its frame of reference, representing a powerful court capital. However, on the other hand, the same literature projects an ‘unofficial’ discourse, a dystopian nightmare where people starved to death in the streets, alienated and alone. The literature of early modern Madrid illustrates this crisis of representation between the two ‘worlds’ of the city that simultaneously narrate a city of extremes. This thesis will analyse the way in which this dual image of the city, its culture and the experience of living in it is produced with such a high degree of intensity within this period of urban development. It will also consider how the experience of the city is revealed through the literature it produced, demonstrating how representations of the city transcend concepts of power and marginalisation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:639900 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Clymer, Camille |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/27637/ |
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