Modernity and Epistemology in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Fringe Discourses

Contributions by Ryan A. Davis, Marta Ferrer Gómez, Jerry Hoeg, Travis Landry, Kevin Larsen, Juan Carlos Martín, Collin McKinney, Alicia Cerezo Paredes, Dale J. Pratt, Elizabeth Smith Rousselle Edited by Ryan A. Davis, Alicia Cerezo Paredes

Publication date:

14 December 2016

Length of book:

242 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498545266

The fraught tension between science and religion has loomed large in scholarship about the nineteenth century in Spain, especially given the prominence of the Catholic Church and the discoveries made by Wallace and Darwin. The struggle for epistemological superiority between these two discourses (science and religion) has served to overshadow certain corners of the cultural landscape that, though prominent sites of intellectual exploration in their day, have received comparatively less scholarly attention until recently. Fringe Discourses brings together a group of essays that seeks to restore a sense of the epistemological richness of nineteenth-century Spain. By exploring the relationship between epistemology, modernity, and subjectivity, these essays recover significant efforts by Spanish authors and intellectuals to explain human nature and their world, which seemed to be changing so radically before their eyes. In doing so the essays also reveal just how elastic the relationship was between science and pseudoscience, genius and quackery. Offering a veritable Wunderkammer, the authors collected here train their sights both on curious fields of study (from pogonolgy, the science of beards, to Spiritualism) and curiouser people (from a government spy on undercover assignment in Morocco dressed as a Moorish prince to a hypnotic huckster who dupes the queen regent). With other authors focusing on science fiction dystopias, mystical journeys, and anatomical symbology, Fringe Discourses reveals the Spanish nineteenth century for the intellectual Wild West it was.

Introduction, Alicia Cerezo Paredes and Ryan A. Davis
Chapter 1: The Artful Science of Ali Bey, Travis Landry
Chapter 2: José de Letamendi, Symbolic Humanity and Contexts for the Individual in Nineteenth-Century Spain, Dale J. Pratt
Chapter 3: Pogonology, Physiognomy, and the Face of Spanish Masculinity, Collin McKinney
Chapter 4: Hysteria and Couvade in Los pazos de Ulloa and Su único hijo, Kevin Larsen
Chapter 5: The Saint and the Hysteric: Mysticism in Nazarín and Dulce Dueño, Elizabeth Smith Rousselle
Chapter 6: The Reception of Charles Darwin in Spain and the Problem of Abulia in Pío Baroja’s Camino de Perfección, Jerry Hoeg
Chapter 7: Darwin in Spain: Evolutionary Theory in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Spanish Science Fiction Narratives, Juan Carlos Martín
Chapter 8: Business of the Heart: Cándida Sanz’s Future-making in the Spiritualist Monthly Constancia (1879–1884), Marta Ferrer Gómez
Chapter 9: “Hypnotism and the Epistemological Limits of Modernity: Alberto de Das and Leopoldo Alas,” Ryan A. Davis

. . . . [this] volume demonstrates that nineteenth-century Spain offers much material and raises intriguing questions, both for literary scholars and for historians of science, that have hitherto been unexplored.