Nueva nobleza, nueva novela:
reescribiendo la cultura urbana del Barroco
by Nieves Romero-Díaz

Nueva nobleza, nueva novela: Reescribiendo la cultura urbana del barroco examines the ideological role of the novela corta in seventeenth-century Spanish culture. Romero-Díaz critiques and develops Maravall’s concept of “the Baroque as a guided culture” from the perspectives of Cultural Materialism and Cultural Studies. Her study demonstrates the way in which the novela corta provides the cultural space for debating one of the most important struggles of the period: the process of ideological redefinition of the nobility in the face of political, social and economic crisis. The author discusses previously-unexplored connections between city expansion, the urban nobility, the popularity of local histories and the production and reception of the novela corta. Romero-Díaz’s analysis of novelas cortas by four representative authors—Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, Alonso de Castillo y Solórzano and Mariana de Carvajal y Saavedra—offers the reader an important new social and gendered understanding of the transformation of the nobility in the urban culture of the Spanish Baroque. 

ISBN: 1-58871-024-6, (PB) 211 pp. 2002, $18.95