Introduction: Interiors and narrative -- The novel's sense of the interior -- The novelist's sense of the interior -- Furnishing the novel -- The threshold: The ins and outs of Quincas Borba -- Movables and immovables: the legend of the Maias -- The corners of the world: inside La Regenta -- Interiors and interiority -- Inside the minds and hearts of Machado's characters -- Eça's interior decorators -- Memory and movement: Ana's and Fermín's interiors -- The discourse of interiors -- Machado's minimalism and the meaning of things -- The narrative life of Eça's furnishings -- The dramatic effect of Clarín's interior architecture -- Epilogue: from Voltaire's garden to Galdós's rooms
Summary
This comparative study is the first to bring together three of the most important writers of the Luso-Hispanic 19th century: Machado de Assis (Brazil), Eça de Queirós (Portugal), and Leopoldo Alas (Spain). It offers new readings of their well-known masterpieces, while uncovering a novel literary and political significance of the interior space in realist fiction. his is the first full-length study to juxtapose three renowned writers of the less known but incredibly important Luso-Brazilian and Spanish literary traditions while at the same time dealing with a thematic concern
