In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.


 

ÓSCAR IVÁN USECHE is an associate professor of Spanish at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. As a specialist in modern peninsular studies, his research focuses on exploring the interaction between science, technology, and cultural production in fin-de-siglo Spain. His work has appeared in a variety of academic publications, including the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Decimonónica, and Siglodiecinueve.

— Laura Otis, author of Banned Emotions: How Metaphors Can Shape What People Feel

— Nicolás Fernández-Medina, author of Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity

— Travis Landry, editor of The Fruits of the Struggle in Diplomacy and War: Moroccan Ambassador al-Ghazzal and His Diplomatic Retinue in Eighteenth-Century Andalusia

— Dale Pratt, author of Signs of Science: Literature, Science and Spanish Modernity Since 1868