SOURCE: Iarocci, Michael P. “Between the Liturgy and the Market: Bourgeois Subjectivity and Romanticism in Larra's ‘La Nochebuena de 1836.’” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 33, no. 1 (January 1999) 41-63.

In the following essay, Iarocci asserts that Larra's critically acclaimed essay “La Nochebuena de 1836” is a fusion of individual romantic subjectivity with contemporary social and political concerns.

The word is the medium in which occur the slow quantitative accretions of those changes which have not yet achieved the status of a new ideological quality, not yet produced a new and fully-fledged ideological form. The word has the capacity to register all the transitory, delicate, momentary phases of social change.

—M. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Among the most widely anthologized of Mariano José de Larra's works, “La Nochebuena de 1836” continues to rank, along with “Horas de Invierno,” “El Día de Difuntos de 1836” and “Necrología. Exequias del...