Spain’s Literature of the City

Abstract

Within the great cities that emerged out of the country’s Industrial Revolution, especially Madrid and Barcelona, Spain’s writers found new metaphors and new settings upon which to build contemporary myths. Through their works, these artists of fiction expose the socio-political realities that undergird Spain’s urban spaces, often turning their critical attention to the city’s margins—to poverty-stricken slums and the outskirts continuously undergoing change due to urban expansion. Writers and filmmakers chronicle urban realities in vivid, lurid, detail, including the experience of city life during and after Spain’s Civil War. In spite of the realistic detail, however, Spain’s novels and films often figure cities as unreal places—the locus of dreams, of nightmares, spaces upon which anxieties get projected, surfaces under which secrets remain hidden or repressed. Their fictional city-dwellers, thus, move through streets, in and out of parks and squares, and into their homes in ways that permit readers to discover the fragility of the country’s social fabric, which belies its cities’ streets and buildings and revises the historical narratives that their monuments commemorate.