The city as spectacle: the nineteenth-century novel and the future that was not fulfilled

Abstract

This paper intends to establish a dialog between the concept of modernity, as it was perceived within the realm of literature and the broader arts produced from the second half of the nineteenth century, and the Futurist movement – experienced during the first decades of the twentieth century – taking into consideration the image of the city, seen as a privileged space by the so-called bourgeois novel and the poetry of the best nineteenth-century poets, who transformed the fictional discourse into a critical form of rereading the reality of a time in crisis, nurturing the groundwork for the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century.