Domestic Fiction and Cursilería in the Fin-de-Siècle Novellas of Salomé Núñez y Topete

Abstract

Fashion guru, author of at least ten feuilletons and collected short stories, and a constant contributor to Hispanic press, Salomé Núñez y Topete (c.1859–1931) barely features in literary studies. Yet she knew Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, Concha Espina and Blanca de los Ríos, often publishing in the same periodicals and working on joint feminist and cultural initiatives. The primary purpose of this article is to initiate Núñez y Topete's recovery as a prominent professional writer in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain, focusing on her fin-de-siècle novellas, serialized works of domestic fiction. The second objective is to examine how domestic fiction intersects with the cursi, a bourgeois construction that mirrored the fragility of middle-class identities in Restoration Spain. My analysis of Núñez y Topete's works extends scholarship on the cursi in the Spanish fin-de-siècle context, which has concentrated almost exclusively on male writers. The cursi was also imbricated in contemporary debates around what constituted sham and genuine culture, the retrograde and modern, and ultimately, foreign imitation and Spanish realist original. Núñez y Topete's novellas critique the sociocultural fractures that engendered the cursi and debate competing middle-class models for personal happiness and national advancement.