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The Monstrous Guide to Madrid: The Grotesque Mode in the Novels of the Villa y Corte (1599-1657)

Gilliam, Bethany Marie
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1410857954

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.
This dissertation examines the relationship between the literary grotesque mode and the growing pains of Madrid during the first century of its status as Villa y Corte, capital of the Spanish empire. The six novels analyzed in this study – Guzman de Alfarache (1599, 1604), El Buscon (1626), Guia y avisos de forasteros (1620), Las harpias en Madrid (1633), El diablo cojuelo (1641) and El Criticon (1651, 1653, 1657) – are significant because their authors employ the grotesque mode to show their perspectives on the changes that they witnessed in Madrid. The central goal of this project is to examine the continued presence of the grotesque mode in these novels and how the use of this mode was motivated by the historical crisis that took place during the years following Philip II’s decision to move the court to Madrid. In this vein, Philip Thomson recognizes that moments of change are particularly conducive to the use of the grotesque in art and literature. Using studies on the grotesque by Thomson, Wolfgang Kayser, Henryk Ziomek, James Iffland and Paul Ilie, this dissertation will present a definition of the grotesque mode as it applies to a carefully chosen grouping of seventeenth-century Spanish novels. This definition is based on three pillars. The first is the tension produced by the combination of the comic and a “sphere of negativity,” the term that Iffland utilizes to signify something that is incompatible with the comic. The second is the grotesque conceit, an exaggeration or distortion of the conceit as formulated by Baltasar Gracian. The third pillar of the grotesque mode is distortion of characters and their actions, which is accomplished through a variety of means. In the selected novels, the most frequent device used to distort the subject is zoomorphism, or the combination of elements of the human, plant and vegetative spheres to describe a single object. The first chapter of this study examines the grotesque picaresque images in Guzman de Alfarache. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s “material bodily concept” as a methodological framework, it demonstrates the increasing connection between the grotesque mode in literature and urban spaces. Chapter Two examines El Buscon and utilizes Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope to examine how the grotesque mode is used in the narrative creation of two new chronotopes in the court city: the “road to Madrid” and the “streets of Madrid.” Chapter Three analyzes the use of the grotesque mode in the immigrant stories included in the courtly novels Guia y avisos de forasteros and Las harpias en Madrid. In these novels, a darker side of Madrid emerges from the shadows of the “land of opportunity” of Madrid, where grotesque descriptions of the upper social classes, while lacking in the picaresque novel, abound. Chapter Four concludes this study with a discussion of how the grotesque mode is used to describe the fight for survival that the inhabitants of Madrid experience in El diablo cojuelo and El Criticon. In this chapter, I propose that Gracian consciously produces a true grotesque aesthetic in El Criticon. In both of these novels, the city of Madrid itself is filled with abnormal, even monstrous, images that show that the Villa y Corte suffered immensely during its growth towards a city worthy of housing the court of the Spanish empire.
Elizabeth B. Davis (Advisor)
Jonathan Burgoyne (Committee Member)
Donald Larson (Committee Member)
232 p.
European History; Foreign Language; Literature; Urban Planning
the grotesque; the grotesque mode; seventeenth-century Madrid; Early Modern; novel; Spain; Bakhtin; Thomson; Iffland; Guzman de Alfarache; El Buscon; Guia y avisos de forasteros; Las harpias en Madrid; El diablo cojuelo; El Criticon; picaresque

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Gilliam, B. M. (2014). The Monstrous Guide to Madrid: The Grotesque Mode in the Novels of the Villa y Corte (1599-1657) [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1410857954

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Gilliam, Bethany. The Monstrous Guide to Madrid: The Grotesque Mode in the Novels of the Villa y Corte (1599-1657). 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1410857954.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Gilliam, Bethany. "The Monstrous Guide to Madrid: The Grotesque Mode in the Novels of the Villa y Corte (1599-1657)." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1410857954

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1410857954
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.