In his stimulating study, Jesus Cruz examines middle-class lifestyles -- generally known as bourgeois culture -- in nineteenth-century Spain. Cruz argues that the middle class ultimately contributed to Spain's democratic stability and economic prosperity in the last decades of the twentieth century. Interdisciplinary in scope, Cruz's work draws upon the methodology of various areas of study -- including material culture, consumer studies, and social history -- to investigate class. In recent years, scholars in the field of Spanish studies have analyzed disparate elements of modern middle-class milieu, such as leisure and sociability, but Cruz looks at these elements as part of the whole. He traces the contribution of nineteenth-century bourgeois cultures not only to Spanish modernity but to the history of Western modernity more broadly. The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain provides key insights for scholars in the fields of Spanish and European studies, including history, literary studies, art history, historical sociology, and political science.

This book examines the processes of production, circulation and reception of images of America in late nineteenth century Spain. When late nineteenth century Spaniards looked at the United States, they, like Tocqueville, ‘saw more than America’. What did they see? Between the ‘glorious’ liberal revolution of 1868 and the run-up to the 1898 war with the US that would end Spain’s New World empire, Spanish liberal and democratic reformers imagined the USA as a place where they could preview the ‘modern way of life’, as a political and social model (or anti-model) to emulate, appropriate or reject, and above all as a 100 year experiment of republicanism, democracy and liberty in practice. Through their writings and discussions of the USA, these Spaniards debated and constructed their own modernity and imagined the place of their nation in the modern world.

Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: A Cultural History provides a panoramic and accessible introduction to the era in which Latin America took its first steps into the Modern Age. Including colorful characters like circus clowns, prostitutes, bullfighters, street puppeteers, and bestselling authors, this book maps vivid and often surprising combinations of the new and the old, the high and the low, and the political and the cultural. Christopher Conway shows that beneath the diversity of the New World there was a deeper structure of shared patterns of cultural creation and meaning. Whether it be the ways that people of refinement from different countries used the same rules of etiquette, or how commoners shared their stories through the same types of songs, Conway creates a multidisciplinary framework for understanding the culture of an entire hemisphere. The book opens with key themes that will help students and scholars understand the century, such as the civilization and barbarism binary, urbanism, the divide between conservatives and liberals, and transculturation. In the chapters that follow, Conway weaves transnational trends together with brief case studies and compelling snapshots that help us understand the period. How much did books and photographs cost in the nineteenth century? What was the dominant style in painting? What kinds of ballroom dancing were popular? Richly illustrated with striking photographs and lithographs, this is a book that invites the reader to rediscover a past age that is not quite past, still resonating into the present.

Confronted by a complex new society, nineteenth-century Spaniards wrestled with how to envisage their lives. From trying to be universal through to acting as a cultural entrepreneur, this volume explores the possibilities and uncertainties that unfolded in their reconfigured world

This volume focuses on intersections of race, class, and gender in the formation of the fin-de-siècle Spanish and Spanish colonial subject. Despite the wealth of research produced on gender, race (largely as it relates to the themes of nationhood and empire), and social class, few studies have focused on how these categories interacted, frequently operating simultaneously to reveal contexts in which dominated groups were dominating and vice versa.

Comfort, both physical and affective, is a key aspect in our conceptualization of the home as a place of emotional attachment, yet its study remains under-developed in the context of the European house. In this volume, Jon Stobart has assembled an international cast of contributors to discuss the ways in which architectural and spatial innovations coupled with the emotional assemblage of objects to create comfortable homes in early modern Europe. The book features a two-section structure focusing on the historiography of architectural and spatial innovations and material culture in the early modern home. It also includes 10 case studies which draw on specific examples, from water closets in Georgian Dublin to wallpapers in 19th-century Cambridge, to illustrate how people made use of and responded to the technological improvements and the emotional assemblage of objects which made the home comfortable. In addition, it explores the role of memory and memorialisation in the domestic space, and the extent to which home comforts could be carried about by travellers or reproduced in places far removed from the home. The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700-1900 offers a fresh contribution to the study of comfort in the early modern home and will be vital reading for academics and students interested in early modern history, material culture and the history of interior architecture.

"Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) was the most prolific and influential woman writer of late nineteenth-century Spain," write the editors of this volume in the MLA's Approaches to Teaching World Literature series. Contending with the critical literary, cultural, and social issues of the period, Pardo Bazán's novels, novellas, short stories, essays, plays, travel writing, and cookbooks offer instructors countless opportunities to engage with a variety of critical frameworks. The wide range of topics in the author's works, from fashion to science and technology to gender equality, and the brilliance of her literary style make Pardo Bazán a compelling figure in the classroom. Part 1, "Materials," provides biographical and critical resources, an overview of Pardo Bazán's vast and diverse oeuvre, and a literary-historical time line. It also reviews secondary sources, editions and translations, and digital resources. The twenty-three essays in part 2, "Approaches," explore various issues that are central to teaching Pardo Bazán's works, including the author's engagement with contemporary literary movements, feminism and gender, nation and the late Spanish empire, Spanish and Galician identities, and nineteenth-century scientific and medical discourses. Film adaptations and translations of Pardo Bazán's works are also addressed. Highlighting the artistic, social, and intellectual currents of Pardo Bazán's writings, this volume will assist instructors who wish to teach the author's works in courses on world literature, nineteenth-century literature, and gender studies as well as in Spanish-language courses.

Focusing on images of or produced by nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-à-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By considering works in a range of media by an array of canonical and understudied women artists, they demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting.

Focusing on images of or produced by well-to-do nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-?is the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By contrast, the essays collected in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting. In examining the relationship between affluent women, femininity and the public, the essays gathered here consider works by an array of artists that includes canonical ones such as Mary Cassatt and Fran?s G?rd as well as understudied women artists including Louise Abb? and Broncia Koller. The essays also consider works in a range of media from fashion prints and paintings to private journals and architectural designs, facilitating an analysis of femininity in public across the cultural production of the period. Various European centers, including Madrid, Florence, Paris, Brittany, Berlin and London, emerge as crucial sites of production for genteel femininity, providing a long-overdue rethinking of modern femininity in the public sphere.

Drawing on expressive and material culture, Young shows that money was not enough to make the genteel middle class. It required exquisite self-control and the right cultural capital to perform ritual etiquette and present oneself confidently, yet modestly. She argues that genteel culture was not merely derivative, but a re-working of aristocratic standards in the context of the middle class necessity to work. Visible throughout the English-speaking world in the 1780s -1830s and onward, genteel culture reveals continuities often obscured by studies based entirely on national frameworks.