Book Details
Valis finds evidence in literature, cultural objects, and popular customs toargue that cursilería has its roots in a sense of cultural inadequacy felt by the lower middle classes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. The Spain of this era, popularly viewed as the European power most resistant to economic and social modernization, is characterized by Valis as suffering nostalgia for a bygone, romanticized society that structured itself on strict class delineations. With the development of an economic middle class during the latter half of the nineteenth century, these designations began to break down, and individuals across all levels of the middle class began to exaggerate their own social status in an attempt to protect their cultural capital. While the resulting occurrences of cursilería were often provincial, indeed backward, the concept was--and still is--closely associated with a sense of "home." Ultimately, Valis shows how cursilería embodied the disparity between old ways and new, and how in its awkward manners, airs of pretension, and graceless anxieties it represents Spain's uneasy surrender to the forces of modernity.
The Culture of Cursilería will interest students and scholars of Latin America, cultural studies, Spanish literature, and modernity.
- Binding Paperback
- Author/s Valis, Noël
- ISBN13 9780822329978
- ISBN10 0822329972
- Pages 405
- Published 2002
- Language English
The culture of "cursilería": bad taste, kitsch, and class in modern Spain
- Author Noël Valis
- Publisher DUKE
- ISBN 9780822329978
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