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This thesis examines literary responses to the so-called Religious Question in nineteenth-century Spain. Debating the place of Catholicism in Spain, this issue marked a cultural rupture between the old order and the modern world. The tensions between traditionalism and liberalism impacted societal perceptions of ecclesiastical edifices, clergy, and religious communities. Questions arose regarding the new roles that the Church was to adopt in a modernising Spain, and the very nature of its beliefs, principles, and practices.
The Napoleonic Occupation of Spain saw the damage towards, and confiscation of, ecclesiastical edifices and the residences of religious orders (nuns, friars, and monks). Similar measures of exclaustration (the suppression of monasteries and convents and the expulsion of their members) and disentailment (the expropriation of Church property) were implemented by subsequent liberal governments, which justified such legislation as an economic necessity to meet the demands of modernisation. Although the political, economic, and artistic effects of disentailment and exclaustration in nineteenth-century Spain have been studied by historians, what remains to be explored are their social, spiritual, and cultural ramifications. My study will foreground these understudied experiences and ideas in literature.
Drawing on Charles Taylor’s philosophical thesis of excarnation, which refers to the disembodying of spirituality through the removal of its visible or incarnational elements, I argue that the Religious Question constituted a departure from the so-called enfleshed forms of religious observance. I will build my discussion of this disjuncture by interweaving theories of religion and memory with literary analysis. After examining nineteenth-century Spanish periodicals and pamphlets associated with contemporary issues of religion and politics, I will develop ideas suggested in these discourses by critically analysing a selection of texts by five major Spanish writers: Cecilia Böhl de Faber (also known as Fernán Caballero) (1796-1877), Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1871), Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-
1920), Rosario de Acuña (1850-1923), and José María de Pereda (1833-1906). My hope is that this project will contribute to discussions on the national and global meanings of ecclesiastical edifices and religious orders and their place in literary and cultural histories. |
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