Interiors and Narrative The Spatial Poetics of Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Leopoldo Alas

Interiors and Narrative is a comparative reading of three realist masterpieces of the Luso-Hispanic 19th century: Machado de Assis's Quincas Borba (1891), Eça de Queirós's The Maias (1888), and Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta (1884-1885). This is the first full-length study to juxtapose the three renowned writers and to reflect on the treatment of interiors, a fundamental leitmotiv in each of the novels not fully explored by existing criticism. While offering new readings of these well-studied novels, this study shows that more than serving the novel thematically the interior space is one of its fundamental formal components. The book explores in three different parts the important links between interiors and narrative. The first part explores the analogies between the architectural design of the novels' domestic settings and the way the authors design their narratives. It asks how do the authors furnish their novels; how do rooms, furnishings, and homes function as metaphors for the writing of the narrative? The second part reflects on the complex relation between private dwellings and human interiority by focusing on how the authors use interior space to develop their characters' identities, memory, and workings of consciousness. The final part argues that the interior design of rooms becomes a language that gives furnishings and decorative objects a narrative life of their own. The story of homes and furnishings creates a semiotic language that both readers and characters rely on in order to make sense of fiction and reality. This book shows how crucial interiors are for our understanding of the nature of narrative. A growing cultural fascination with interior dwelling so prevalent in the late nineteenth century parallels an intensification of the rhetorical function interior architecture plays in the development of fiction. The existential dimension of dwelling becomes so intimately tied to the novelistic project that fiction surfaces as a way of inhabiting the world.