| A series of economic, social, and cultural changes define the first decades of the twentieth century. Avant-garde literature and arts are inexorably intertwined with these patterns of development. The new configuration of the urban environment, determined by the aggressive forces of modern capitalism and emerging mass society, provokes the emergence of a new art. The goal of this dissertation is to analyze both the explicit and the more subtle presence of those patterns as reflected in the broadly understood Spanish avant-garde narrative and prose production in the 1920s and 1930s.; In this respect, this dissertation focuses on the relationship between modernity and the city, on how the redefinition of language and time in the modern urban context determines the rise of new artistic manifestations, as well as on the fictionalization of the modern urban phenomena. Avant-garde Spanish narrative and prose, through the most diverse genres---novel, short story, essay, personal letters, memoirs, and other writing---is engaged in searching for new artistic codes channeling these emerging urban phenomena of the new modern mass society. Cinema, travels, feminism, and political and philosophical conflicts give rise to the emergence of a completely new cluster of literary techniques, which all together helped to articulate a new portrait of modern city. Within this perspective, this dissertation explores how cinematic strategies influence city writing; how feminist essays and their rearticulation of public spaces gave an important impulse to Spanish modernity; how the city of New York is recreated and fictionalized in the personal letters of Federico Garcia Lorca as contrasted to his lectures and poetry; and, finally, how Spanish narrative designed a different literary city in view of the emerging political and social conflicts of the thirties which would lead to the tragedy of the Civil War. |
