Memory, temporality, and ideas of progress in the short fiction of Leopoldo Alas "Clarín"

Cawthorn, Isabel (2024). Memory, temporality, and ideas of progress in the short fiction of Leopoldo Alas "Clarín". University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis studies the way that memory and temporality in selected short stories by Leopoldo Alas “Clarín” (1852-1901) illustrate ideas of progress in the latter half of the nineteenth century. During a period when ideas of progress were varied and, at times, ill-defined, these stories reveal the complexities at the root of formulating and articulating progress and regeneration. The thesis analyses a corpus of twenty short stories taken from six published collections and constitutes the first major study of several of these stories. By examining the function of memory and temporality in particular, this thesis addresses a dearth in the study of Clarín’s fiction, demonstrating that Clarín’s experimentation with time and memory allows for the relationship between the past and the present, and the remembering or forgetting of the past, to be placed at the centre of Clarín’s vision of progress.

Chapter One explores Clarín’s use of the rural and provincial spaces to highlight his critique of myopic visions of capitalist progress, emphasising these settings as spaces of resistance, but also ones in which failures of modernity are particularly acute. In Chapter Two, the tropes of death and disease are explored in relation to memory and oblivion, revealing a questioning of degenerationist discourses. In Chapter Three, I explore the creation of national historical myths, revealing these histories and mythologies as blockages to the development of progressive collective remembering. The final chapter builds on the previous chapters by examining the idea of historical myth in relation to the notion of origin. I argue that the return to ancient and biblical origin is questioned and satirised by Clarín as narratives of regeneration based upon a restoration of origin ultimately fail to materialise.

The findings of this research demonstrate the complexity surrounding what constitutes a progressive society and what factors are at play in constructing it. This also contributes to wider conceptions of the nineteenth century, as imaginings of alternative modernities at a time when Spain was experiencing systemic political failures and corruption, civil conflict, military defeat, ‘decadence’, and ‘degeneration’, offer readings of memory as challenging established ideas surrounding progress. This thesis offers a way of approaching the study of memory in the context of the nineteenth century, a concept which has hitherto been applied primarily to the twentieth-century context, and thus traces a treatment of history and the past in the literary, political, and social life of the nineteenth century.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):