This book examines the significance of probably the most famous year in modern Spanish culture - 1898, which marked her defeat in the Spanish American War. The editors have brought together 21 essays by international specialists in the field.

Quixotic Modernists gives close readings of two novels by two little-studied writers of the early twentieth century in Spain, Felipe Trigo's Las ingenuas (1901) and Maria Martinez Sierra's Tu eres la paz (1906), in relation to the canonical Tristana by Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist. This study shows the modern message (regarding gender), and modernist qualities of the prose of these works. Included are discussions of Quijote intertexts, proverbial language and tactics, the angel and the mujer-nina, flower, water, and animal imagery, and visual arts in relation to gender definition. Also included are contemporary responses to the novels and material about the authors' lives and Spain's social conditions in the early twentieth century. Quixotic Modernists integrates these themes into a study of the novelization of difficulties in transforming contemporary gender and class roles. In all three authors' works, this process of change in roles for both men and women becomes a quixotic enterprise, in which artists as/and characters search to reconnect with an elusive material, social body.

This book offers a comprehensive account of modern Spanish culture, tracing its dramatic and often unexpected development from its beginnings after the Revolution of 1868 to the present day. Specially-commissioned essays by leading experts provide analyses of the historical and political background of modern Spain, the culture of the major autonomous regions (notably Castile, Catalonia, and the Basque Country), and the country's literature: narrative, poetry, theatre and the essay. Spain's recent development is divided into three main phases: from 1868 to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; the period of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco; and the post-Franco arrival of democracy. The concept of 'Spanish culture' is investigated, and there are studies of Spanish painting and sculpture, architecture, cinema, dance, music, and the modern media. A chronology and guides to further reading are provided, making the volume an invaluable introduction to the politics, literature and culture of modern Spain.

Modernism, Ruben Darío, and the Poetics of Despair presents a detailed study of a neglected facet of Ruben Darío, and in general, of Hispanic Modernism: metaphysical and existential dimensions as preludes to Modernity. Alberto Acereda and J. Rigoberto Guevara approach the life and death issues in Darío works with special emphasis on his poetry. The authors demonstrate how the Nicaraguan poet takes the first steps towards poetic modernity. The tragic component of Darío works are examined in the light of Nineteenth Century philosophy, especially the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Various thematic proposals are also formulated for the study of the works of Ruben Darío.

First complete English translation of "Songs of Life and Hope "and "The Swan and Other Poetry " by Ruben Dario, one of the greatest poets to emerge from Latin America.

The Spanish novel in a turbulent century.

What distinguishes an adventure novel from a historical novel? Can the same text belong to several genres? More to one than to another? Have some existing genres been overlooked? To answer these and similar questions, José Calvo Tello combines methods from Linguistics (lexicography), Literary Studies (genre theory), and Computer Science (machine learning, natural language processing). Located in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, this study analyzes a newly developed corpus of 358 Spanish novels of the silver age (1880-1939), which includes authors like Baroja, Pardo Bazán, or Valle-Inclán. Calvo Tello's key result is a graph-based model of literary genre that reconciles recent theoretical approaches.

This 1998 book studies the ways in which nineteenth-century Spanish American writers and intellectuals imagined, described, and promoted idealized notions of a pan-Hispanic culture.

Writing Teresa: The Saint from Ávila at the fin-de-siglo examines the Teresa de Jesús “boom” of roughly 1880–1930, and offers an in-depth study of five major Spanish participants in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century explosion of literary treatments of St. Teresa. This historical period’s interest in the Saint from Ávila relates to popularization and nationalization of aspects of Catholicism, technological advances, a modernist fascination with saintly heroes, the search for new Spanish identities, and the evolving role of women writers and intellectuals. Teresa was mysticism in its historical context, energy in a time of doubt, the possibility of reconciling science and spirituality, a new vision for writing, and a maternal figure linked to the religion of the past for those who had lost the faith of their childhood.