The most important periodicals of the Romantic period were El Artista (1835–1836) and the Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol (1836–1857). Directed by Eugenio de Ochoa, El Artista was modeled on the French L’Artiste, and it served as an important vehicle for Romantic polemics against a Neoclassical literary establishment perceived to be excessively formulaic and historically out of step. The journal’s collaborators included, among others, Jose´ de Espronceda, Patricio de la Escosura, Jacinto Salas y Quiroga, and Jose´ Zorrilla. The journal also became known for the high-quality graphic art, directed by Pedro Madrazo, that accompanied its essays, stories, and poems, and the interplay between verbal and visual representations in El Artista announced a tendency destined to grow stronger over the course of the century as technological advances in the graphic arts – and later, photography – facilitated the juxtaposition of words and images. Indeed, the long-lived Semanario Pintoresco Espan˜ol, directed by Ramo´n de Mesonero Romanos, owed much of its success to the numerous illustrations that accompanied its articles, and the journal’s status as one of the premier vehicles of publication for the brief sketch of social manners that came to be known as the cuadro de costumbres depended in large measure on such combinations.

The modern genealogy of the cuadro de costumbres can be traced to the Enlightenment shift toward a decidedly empirical epistemology, and the genre’s antecedents in eighteenth-century Spain all reveal an increasing focus on the representation of contemporary social life. Early examples of costumbrista representation can be found across a wide range of eighteenth-century cultural forms that include, among others, the short essays of Jose´ Clavijo y Fajardo’s journal El Pensador (1762–1767), the social satire of Leandro Ferna´ndez Morat´ın’s theatre (in El cafe´, for example), the comedic sainetes of Ramo´n de la Cruz, the painter Francisco Goya’s satirical caprichos, and the folkloric turn of music collectors such as Juan Antonio de Iza Zama´cola.12 Most literary historians have noted, however, that the cuadro de costumbres does not become fully established

10 Leonardo Romero Tobar, Panorama cr´ıtico del romanticismo espan˜ol (Madrid: Castalia,

1994), pp. 49–50.

11 Lee Fontanella, “The Fashion and Styles of Spain’s Costumbrismo.” Revista Canadiense

De Estudios Hispa´nicos 6.2 (1982), pp. 175–189.

12 Rinaldo Froldi, “Anticipaciones dieciochescas del costumbrismo roma´ntico.” Romanti-

Cismo 6 (1996), pp. 163–170.

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Romantic prose, journalism, and costumbrismo 387

As a distinctive literary genre until the 1830s, when it crystallizes in the form of a brief newspaper article aimed at a middle-class reading public.

For one of the genre’s leading scholars, costumbrismo inaugurates nothing less than a fundamentally new form of literary mimesis inasmuch as its object of representation is no longer an abstract, universal human nature, but rather a human subject deeply enmeshed in a specific time and place.13 In displacing the older universalist premises, costumbrismo can thus be understood as performing a secularizing function similar to Romantic historicism, and, like the Realist dimensions of the historical novel, costumbrismo’s dominant mode of representation again seems to fly in the face of the lyricism traditionally associated with Romantic rhetoric. The ostensibly objective focus of the cuadro de costumbres and the internal world of Romantic poetic expression, however, are in many ways two sides of the same coin. For with few exceptions, and despite Romantic myths to the contrary, the Romantic gaze – whether turned inward to the subject or outward to the objects that surround it – registered a fundamentally bourgeois world view. While poetic representations of Romantic subjectivity provided complex models of the self for an emergent liberalism that had posited the individual as its basic unit of reference, the seemingly more objective qualities of costumbrista mimesis worked to index the external world to the predominantly middle-class perspective that increasingly structured the Spanish polity.14

Indeed, taken collectively, the pages of costumbrista periodicals display a veritable taxonomy of personages (beggars, laborers, doormen, shopkeepers, bankers, functionaries), public spaces (cafes, restaurants, boulevards, plazas), and shared customs (the siesta, the evening walk, the bullfight, the invitation to a meal, the New Year’s Eve celebration). While such an inventory points to the burgeoning classificatory rhetoric of the sciences, the common denominator to this wide array of representations is the figure of the observer himself, the literate narrator who becomes the measure of the reality he attempts to document. Akin to the French flaˆneur, the costumbrista is a man about town, an observer who, with notebook in hand, takes in his surroundings in order to represent them as “slices of life” for his readers. Typically male and middle-class, the identity of the costumbrista narrator in many ways replicated the ideal citizen – the man of property – predicated by liberal ideology.

• The historical novel of the early nineteenth century may thus…

Romantic poetry was given new life by the innovations of both Be´cquer and Castro, as each found poetic language, often inspired by popular forms, for new modalities of individual subjectivity. Thus, these two poets also pointed the way toward the next significant innovations in the Spanish poetic tradition, those that

• The stories they tell are witnessed events or events with…

La novela. . . para ser lo que la literatura quiere hoy que sea, ha de describir costumbres, ha de desenvolver pasiones, ha de pintar caracteres; si a estas condiciones generales anade la circunstancia de que las costumbres, los caracteres, las pasiones que describa, se enlacen naturalmente con los nombres

• Enrique Gil’s El senor de Bembibre, arguably the most…

1 Derek Flitter, Spanish Romantic Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1–22. 2 Georg Luka´cs, The Historical Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), Pp. 19–30. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Romantic prose, journalism, and costumbrismo 383 To flee from its present, frequently taking refuge in medieval settings and

• In his translations published in the newspaper El museo universal…

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century 453 And materialism. The moral abyss created by reason and a possible lack of religious beliefs is accompanied in Gritos del combate by attacks leveled at Darwinist and scientific philosophies, as well as at bloody

• Using principally the twelfth and fourteenth…

Sentimental theatre mixed elements of comedy and tragedy, but in the hands of its best practitioners it became an effective way to promote the education of the audience and reform of the stage, paving the way for the drama of the Romantic era. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Part