Urbanism and Urbanity: The Spanish Bourgeois Novel and Contemporary Customs (1845–1925) by Leigh Mercer (review)

Abstract

MERCER, LEIGH. Urbanism and Urbanity: The Spanish Bourgeois Novel and Contemporary Customs (1845-1925). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2013. xi + 201 pp.Driven by spirit of work in urban geography that has influenced language and literature fields more and more since 1991-the date of English translation of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974) by Donald Nicholson-SmithLeigh Mercer's first book combines urban novels, everyday practices, and city planning in a wonderfully textured study of social space. Building explicitly on studies of and literature in Madrid and Barcelona by Edward Baker, Daniel Frost, Jo Labanyi, and Joan Ramon Resina, and dovetailing also with work by Tom Lewis, Rebecca Haidt, Eugenia Afinoguenova, Susan Larson, Carlos Ramos and myself (among others), Mercer is concerned above all else with idea of public space as a performative realm in which Spanish middle class enacted and displayed, first, its coming of age and, later, its own decline into decadence (5).Through an intriguing method and organizational scheme, Urbanism and Urbanity demonstrates that the bourgeois social of nineteenthand early twentieth-century novel are primarily gendered spaces while convincingly tying culture of display into historical, economic, and political trappings of urban (8). That is, book is wonderfully verteb rated by specific urban spaces; it is dedicated, then, like many novels and urban guides of period, to the comprehension of particular and site-specific spatially encoded rituals-specifically those unfolding in the museum, theater, promenade, boutique, stock market, casino, Congress and field of honor, all sites where gendered class identities are performed (4). As a nuanced painter of modern life in Spanish cities, Mercer is attentive to how historically gendered notions of private/public space both structure social life and are challenged by oppositional readings. At same time, central move of her work is, I would say, to fuse large-scale modern shifts and small-scale (personal-individual) practices. Discussion of each site in her work's chapters shows multiple novels to be [participating in larger cultural discourse emanating from urban plans, conduct manuals, and city guides of this era (17). Ultimately, book's persistent and interwoven focus on three literary moments in modernity (i.e., folletines, Realist novels, and fin de siglo novels) allows for a dynamic discussion that engages hallmark characteristics of literary periodization as it has been theorized within Hispanic Studies more generally, while going beyond such admittedly disciplinary concerns.In first part of chapter one, All World's Her Stage: The Museum and Theater, Mercer invokes Benito Perez Galdos (La desheredada), Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco (Maria, la hija de un jornalero), Clarin (La Regenta), and Vicente Blasco Ibanez (La maja desnuda) in discussion of how in these Spanish novels the museum appears as an institution dedicated to production of so-called ideal woman, a context in which women, through their objectification by male gaze, can be possessed and exhibited (26). Exploration of social space of museum, in this example, carries us from one novel to another in succession and selectively-according to site-specific logic driving Urbanism and Urbanityencouraging active reader to see textures, multiplicity, and even friction, where focus on one novel alone (and in isolation) would be misleading and perhaps insufficient. …