Modernity's Metonyms Figuring Time in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Stories

Modernity's Metonyms considers the representation of temporal frameworks in stones by the nineteenth-century Spanish authors Leopoldo Alas and Antonio Ros de Olano. Adopting a metonymic approach-exploring the reiteration of specific associations across a range of disciplines, from literature, philosophy, and historiography to natural historyùauthor Geraldine Lawless explores the associations prompted by three themes: the railway, food, and suicide. She argues that literary modernity was the expression of the perception that a linear model of timeùbringing together the past, the present, and the futureùhad fragmented into a proliferation of simultaneous moments.

Gerald1ne Lawless is lecturer in Spanish in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde.