Ciaran Harty

I am in the final year of my PhD research, which is funded by the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. Expanding on my MRes dissertation which examined the representation of Madrid in the artículos de costumbres of Romantic journalist Mariano José de Larra (1809-37), my thesis looks at the development of costumbrismo - a type of literature in prose focused on social observation and the representation of life in the city - at the end of the Spansih Enlightenment. Specifically, it focuses on the period corresponding to the reign of Carlos IV (1788-1808) and analyses a corpus of journalistic articles published in different issues of the daily newspaper Diario de Madrid, as well as an assorted collection of six costumbrista works which describe the customs and habits of Madrid types and provide representations of everyday scenes in the Spanish capital during a period of accelerated social and cultural change. My thesis aims to show how costumbrista prose began to emerge during these final two decades of the Enlightenment period, decades before its consolidation as a genre in the 1830s with canonical writers such as Mariano José de Larra and Ramón de Mesonero Romanos. The research questions addressed in this project include: 

- What role did the Diario de Madrid play in the development of costumbrismo as a literary genre? 

- How are the Spanish capital's evolving urban spaces represented in enlightenment costumbrista literature? 

- In what ways is reformers' preoccupation for social control represented in early costumbrismo? 

- To what extent did this nascent literary genre serve as a behavioural guide in narrative form for parents responsible for their children's education?

I am currently teaching Spanish grammar and language on the Beginners module and have previously taught on the Level 1 and 2 modules.