Early Twentieth-century Spain Research Articles

Tórtola Valencia, José Zamora, and the art of queer collaboration

ABSTRACT This article assembles and analyzes an archive of texts and images that attest to the interactions of the modern dancer Carmen Tórtola Valencia and the illustrator José (Pepito) Zamora between 1914 and 1917. Their relationship emerges from the archive as a collaboration whose queerness hinges on their performances of non-normative gender, rumors concerning their homosexual inclinations, and their joint efforts to increase their celebrity and nourish their creative work. Tórtola and Zamora cultivated their queer personas and drew attention to their art by associating with one another. Their queerness and creativity were a shared endeavor that issued from and fed into a series of public performances, dances, costume designs, illustrations, and novels. Studying this collaboration requires a methodological shift in relation to previous scholarship on early twentieth-century Spain, which has tended to segregate research on male homosexuality from work on female homosexuality or lesbianism. Today there is a growing need to recognize the rich interactions between individuals who occupied different positions on spectra of sex, gender, and sexuality in modern Spain. Tórtola and Zamora have been largely overlooked in existing studies of male or female homosexuality; they are more at home in an examination of queer culture.

Transforming mineral capital into human capital? Mining and education in early twentieth-century Spain

Abstract Using a highly detailed dataset at the municipality level, drawn from the Spanish Mining Cadastre of 1890, this paper shows how the mining sector affected education provision and human capital formation in early twentieth century Spain. The results indicate that there were two patterns in mining towns. Those mines that invested in technology, those highly productive, and those with post-extraction industries linkages were able to transform mineral capital into human capital. However, in areas where mines were characterized by unskilled labour and low living standard, the mining sector had a negative impact on education, especially in women’s human capital formation.

Spanish and Catalan Perceptions of Blackness: The Cases of El negro que tenía el alma blanca (1922) and Llibertat! (1901)

Abstract: This paper explores how Blackness was perceived in early twentieth century Spain and Catalonia by analyzing two literary works: the novel El negro que tenía el alma blanca (1922) by Alberto Insúa and the theatre play Llibertat! (1901) by Santiago Rusiñol. The essay employs Frantz Fanon’s post-colonial and psychoanalytical theory about the colonized subject to provide a snapshot of Spanish and Catalan perceptions of Blackness in the early twentieth century, contributing to the flourishing debate about race in Iberian Studies. The article demonstrates that the plots of the texts, despite being lauded as antiracist, reproduce hegemonic discourses of race and replicate hegemonic racial tropes. In particular, these literary works sharply illuminate the authors’ hegemonic perceptions of black people. The literary analysis indicates that at the beginning of the twentieth century hegemonic discourses of the Other permeated the Iberian Peninsula, and Spanish and Catalan societies were afflicted by them and unable to conceptualize racial difference beyond stereotypes.

Becoming white(r): skin-whitening creams for white women? Contradictory cosmetics in early twentieth-century Spain

ABSTRACT The market for skin-whitening creams in Spain exploded in the early twentieth century. Marketing whiteness presented a particular challenge because of the contradictory nature of the pursuit: if even white people had to strive for whiteness, it was surely exposed as a construction, rather than a natural state of being. Skin-whitening products thus went against the “ordinary, neutral, even universal” manner in which whiteness was traditionally represented, as outlined in Dyer’s White (2017, xvi). How could skin-whitening creams sell whiteness without stripping it of the invisibility that made it so powerful? To add to the challenge, marketing whiteness presented a particular problem in Spain, a country so sensitive about its whiteness. Studying the changes in the advertising approaches of two case studies in Spain, Crema Tokalon and Cera Aseptina, reveals that the term blanquear was introduced very gradually, only appearing explicitly as a unique selling point in 1930. By 1933, it was removed almost as quickly as it was added. Despite this retraction, I argue that the colour white remained central to the appeal of skin-whitening products in Spain. Whiteness had not become unsellable; rather, it had become invisible, woven into other desirable traits, such as religiosity, cleanliness and suitability for marriage.

Anna Kathryn Kendrick, Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain,

Anna Kathryn Kendrick, Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain,

Myth-Busters: Women Writers and the Myths of Modern Male Individualism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain

Men and women experienced, and therefore wrote about, modernity in ways shaped by history, culture, class and gender. This study examines how Blanca de los Ríos (1859–1956) and Margarita Nelken (1894–1968) reinterpreted the figures of Don Quixote, Don Juan and others as emblematic of specifically male understandings of what it means to be modern. Their texts reveal that contemporary mythic stories about modern individualism rely on prescribed gender-specific roles and therefore exclude woman as agents in a modern society largely constructed by and for man. This study explores how their texts decentre the male narrator as ‘author’ of modernity.

Rafaela Sánchez Aroca (1869-1939). Artista, docente y periodista cultural

This article focuses on the career of Rafaela Sánchez Aroca (Córdoba, 1869 - Barcelona, ​​1939), as plastic creator, art professor and cultural disseminator. Despite her prolific trajectory, she remains poorly known. In sum, this essay aims to discuss the contributions made by women in the production and dissemination of the plastic arts, in early twentieth-century Spain.

Patriarchal Politics in Pre-Civil War Spain: Prostitution in Ángela Graupera’s Anarcho-feminist Novellas

For anarchists and leftists in pre-Civil War Spain, prostitution epitomized women’s sexual and economic subordination under patriarchal, capitalist structures. Though both anarchist and Marxist discourses conflated gender and class equality, believing women’s emancipation to be an organic consequence of social revolution, the lack of focus on female-specific concerns in anti-capitalist ideations has attracted criticism from feminist scholars. Grounding an analysis within these theoretical and historical contexts, this article interrogates how Ángela Graupera, a little-known Catalan activist and writer, used the trope of prostitution to examine these issues in her novellas, published as part of the La Novela Libre and La Novela Ideal series that were printed by the anarchist magazine La Revista Blanca in the 1920s and 1930s. Through a close reading of selected texts, the examination explores how prostitution functions as a metaphor for female subordination, facilitating a critique of androcentric socio-economic discourses and hegemonic sexual politics in early twentieth-century Spain.

Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain by Anna Kathryn Kendrick

Reviewed by: Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain by Anna Kathryn Kendrick Pamela Beth Radcliff Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain. By Anna Kathryn Kendrick. Oxford, UK: Legenda Press, 2020. ix + 305 pp. Cloth $99, paper $12.50. Humanizing Childhood explores the debates and practices surrounding the emerging discipline of the study of childhood in early twentieth-century Spain. Linked to the transnational education reform movement in Europe and the United States, artists, poets, educators, and philosophers in Spain developed new frameworks to understand the "world of the child" in order to guide children to their full human potential. On one hand, children served as an inspiration to avant-garde artists and poets; on the other hand, educators debated how best to intervene in their development. The over-arching theme of "paedology," or child studies, was the focus on the "whole child" and their role in the individual process of "humanization" through their phenomenological interaction with the world. The book provides a welcome addition to the relatively undeveloped field of the Spanish history of childhood and will be of comparative interest to scholars working on the reconfiguration of childhood and education reform movements in the twentieth century. One of Kendrick's main themes is to situate the Spanish case in a transnational context while exploring the national roots of new ideas about childhood and education. Spaniards absorbed the broader scholarship on holistic education through the translation of texts and visits to observe practices in other countries. For example, translated editions of Freud's works appeared in the Revista de Occidente after 1922, while the main text on Gestalt therapy was published in 1926. Maria Montessori's translated work appeared in Spanish in 1916, and the almost three dozen Montessori schools established in Catalonia by the 1930s were crucial to the movement's globalization. Montessori herself was first invited to speak in Barcelona in 1913 and served as director of Spain's Montessori Institute from 1918–21. At the same time, Kendrick does not paint a simplistic portrait of a "peripheral" nation accessing "advanced" Western culture. Spain had its own bifurcated humanistic tradition, a Catholic version and a secular version embodied in the influential Institute for Free Education (ILE), established in the late nineteenth century, as well as in Spain's anarchist philosophical [End Page 165] tradition. The ILE was influenced by the German philosophical movement of the nineteenth century called Krausism, which proposed a holistic approach to human nature that integrated mind, body, and spirit. The ILE tradition of secular humanist education as the key to social reform, modernization, and national development culminated in the Second Republic of the 1930s. Republican leaders ascribed almost mystical powers to education and invested major resources into reforming and expanding the country's educational infrastructure and disseminating culture through the touring theater troupes of the "pedagogical missions." One of the virtues of the book is to demonstrate the broader dissemination of these ideas through tacking back and forth between well-known figures like Ortega y Gasset and unknown individuals like teacher Margarita Aranda, who founded an open-air school in Madrid in the late 1920s. On the other hand, I would have liked to have seen more acknowledgement of the tension between these "universal" theories of childhood development and the deep class, regional, and religious divisions that structured Spanish society in the 1930s. Kendrick employs the Krausist trinity of mind, body, and spirit to structure the three parts of the book, each of which contains two chapters exploring one aspect of these concepts from the perspective of debates about childhood development and education. The first section, on the mind, explores how educators, psychologists, and poets theorized children's mental learning process, drawing on Gestalt therapy and "globalization theory" in the first chapter and on poets' fascination with childhood and children's writings in chapter 2. The poetry chapter provides a good example of the circularity of the debate, in which avant-garde poets sought inspiration from children as "pre-verbal muses" while educators developed poetry, literature and theater adapted for children. Part two, on the body, focuses on how "new" biological concepts of childhood development through tactile interaction with the world were...

Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain by Anna Kathryn Kendrick

Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain by Anna Kathryn Kendrick

Transnational Feminism and Spanish Magazines at the Turn of the Century

Transnational Feminism and Spanish Magazines at the Turn of the Century Marina Cano (bio) Berliner Philharmonie, June 9, 1904, 8:00 p.m. A large audience eagerly awaited the opening of the second public meeting of the International Council of Women in Berlin. Created sixteen years earlier to connect women across the globe, the Council was about to confirm its support for women's suffrage. For the next two days, president-elect the Countess of Aberdeen (from Britain), and vice presidents Mrs. Siegfried (France), Maria Stritt (Germany), and Hierta Retzius (Sweden), among numerous other international delegates, delivered speeches on female suffrage, white slavery, and world peace, in front of an audience of 700–1,000 delegates and members of the public.1 On that night of June 9, the audience seemed "impatient of nothing excepting suggestions of the omission or abridgement of some speech," even when the event ran for three instead of two hours, as scheduled.2 One eager listener was Spanish-Portuguese feminist Alicia Pestana (1860–1929). She later reported on her German experience in La Lectura, one of the leading cultural magazines printed in Madrid. There, and inspired by the event, Pestana encouraged women from all social classes to shed their fetters and unite in the fight for gender equality (Pestana, "Asambleas de Berlín," 43).3 The impact of the International Council of Women Conference on Pestana and other attendees points to the council's performative quality. Barbara Green has identified the theatrical and performative character of the suffrage campaign, which frequently involved pageants, marches, demonstrations, and public meetings. All these activities, Green argues, shaped political thinking, performativity being at the heart of suffrage activism.4 [End Page 47] The Council in Berlin and Pestana's periodical report, I suggest, share some of this performative quality. It is this quality of Pestana's essay, and of other essays in the Spanish press, that I wish to explore in what follows. I expand on Green's argument to propose that, in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain, periodicals such as La Lectura performatively helped forge international links among women. The importance of such international connections for a better understanding of the history of modern feminism has already been established. In her pioneering Golden Cables of Sympathy (1999), Margaret McFadden studies the formation of an international feminist matrix in the early and mid-nineteenth century, thanks to the rise of technology, greater travel opportunities, the anti-slavery movement, and advances in education. For McFadden, this transatlantic network included Britain, the United States, Scandinavia, France, and Italy, primarily.5 Along similar lines, Bonnie S. Anderson surveys early developments of the international women's movement in Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 1830–1860 (2000). Her case studies are the lives of twenty leading campaigners across the world, such as Harriet Taylor Mill (Britain), Lucretia Mott (the United States), Jenny d'Héricourt (France), and Malwida von Meysenbug (Germany).6 Despite these and other excellent studies of the transnational women's movement, Spain remains notably absent from the historical picture of international feminism.7 There is good reason for such neglect: the woman movement took notoriously long to blossom in the country, due to a complex mixture of political conservatism, belated industrialism, and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.8 As late as 1919 (when women over thirty had already achieved the vote in Britain), Spanish activist Margarita Nelken lamented the absence of a feminist tradition in the country: "Our feminism is recent and rare," she notes.9 Nelken blames Spanish women who, unlike their European neighbors, had largely remained aloof from the fight for their civic rights. What little activism there is, Nelken continues, is the effect of the pressure exercised by other countries—Britain, France, the United States, and Scandinavian and South American nations, where feminism has been flourishing for at least one century (La condición social, 29–30). Such history of apparent belatedness and international "effects" makes the Spanish case particularly significant to understand the dynamics of European feminisms and the ways international connections are established. Nelken might have accused Spanish women of being "anti-feminist," but the wealth of recent scholarship...

‘The only delight of my life’: the collection of Pablo Bosch (1841–1915) and its bequest to the Museo del Prado

Abstract The collection of Pablo Bosch, bequeathed to the Museo del Prado in 1915, was one of the most prestigious in early twentieth-century Spain. To date, no detailed study of it has been undertaken. Documentary sources allow for a reconstruction of Bosch’s life and his network of contacts, revealing his artistic preferences and notably his taste for early Flemish painting. Information provided by his correspondence also supports a reconstruction of his two principal collections (paintings, and coins and medals) and new data on many of the works that he owned is published here. An analysis of legal documents and the minutes of the meetings of the museum’s board of trustees provides more detailed information on the Prado’s management of the bequest from 1915 and permits some suggestions to be formulated regarding the decisions taken by Bosch in his several wills.

‘A Latin Can Be Worth Just as Much or More than a Saxon’: Boxing, Gender, and Transnational Latinity in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Spain

This article examines Spanish press coverage of boxing upon its entry into Spain’s ‘media space’ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our analysis highlights how the mix of fascination, repugnance, and admiration displayed toward the sport were shaped by the broader context of imperial rivalry and anxieties about the purported decline of Spain and other Latin nations vis-à-vis the ascendant Anglo-Saxon nations. Criticizing boxing as brutish and barbaric provided defenders of Spanish identity and tradition with a means of challenging dominant racial and civilizational hierarchies. The bitterly ironic tone of most articles was reflective of the defensiveness engendered by the emasculating military defeats and economic struggles suffered by Spain and its Latin neighbors. Coverage of boxing, however, was not uniformly negative, as Spanish writers displayed admiration for successful French fighters, especially when they defeated Americans or Britons, as their achievements generated reassurance about the ongoing vitality of the Latin race. In this manner, media coverage of boxing served as a conduit for the articulation and transmission of understandings of identity and alterity that traversed national boundaries. Aside from having strong racial components, these understandings were deeply entwined with morally charged notions of masculine virility and cultural civility.

Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses by Aurélie Vialette

Reviewed by: Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses by Aurélie Vialette Nicolás Fernández-Medina Vialette, Aurélie. Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses. Purdue UP, 2018. 280 pp. ISBN: 978-1-55753-823-9. Aurélie Vialette’s Intellectual Philanthropy: The Seduction of the Masses argues that philanthropy in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain was anything but an altruistic and disinterested enterprise of human advancement and welfare. In Vialette’s analysis, philanthropy during this period in Spain (it should be noted that the overwhelming focus is on Barcelona) was a highly political, organized, and strategic endeavor coordinated by the bourgeoisie as a means of controlling the working class and regulating their aspirations for (revolutionary) change and social advancement. For Vialette, however, the complexities of power inherent in philanthropic engagement do not end here. The bourgeois quest for social control during a period of rapid industrial expansion in Spain involved “seducing” the working class into believing that social hierarchies and inequalities were in fact beneficial for the advancement of society in general. Thus, philanthropy “was used as a device to seduce the workers into entering structures of sociality to block the possible emergence of social conflicts and upward mobility” (4). At first glance, Vialette’s social control approach, which at times can be a bit heavy-handed in its application of Marxist and post-structuralist theories, might appear overly deterministic regarding philanthropic engagement, yet it powerfully succeeds in demonstrating through an array of primary materials and archival scholarship how philanthropy did in fact play a hand in shaping the social ethos of Spanish workers. Along with the Introduction and the Conclusion, the book is divided into 3 parts consisting of seven chapters. Part One, Staging Philanthropy, introduces “Musical Philanthropy.” The focus here is the composer, writer, and politician Josep Anselm Clavé and his choral groups (Cors de Clavé) of industrial workers. As Vialette demonstrates, the fact that illiterate industrial workers were exhibited on stage and dutifully trained to sing in harmony for Catalan society transformed this potentially revolutionary class into a “spectacle . . . of a peaceful collectivity” (41). In Chapter 2, “Archiving Philanthropy,” Vialette extends her research on Clavé inquiring into the construction of his archive. She proposes a theory of the private archive not as a “symbol of spontaneous authenticity” (a concept that remains somewhat undefined), but as the particular site in which cultural figures like Clavé could effectively place a blueprint, as it were, of their biographical persona for posterity. With Chapter 3, “Performing Los filántropos,” the book takes a turn toward theater in the analysis of an anonymous play Los filántropos written sometime between 1851 and 1900. While Vialette skillfully argues that the stage director’s edits of the play can be read as a type of “practice” of philanthropy (the stage director softened the play’s social critiques), various questions concerning the play’s possible staging, reception, and circulation problematize the larger argument that “performing philanthropy on stage transformed the theater into a tool that could transmit a discourse on how to critically perceive the implications of the philanthropic act in society” (103). Part Two, Bibliophilanthropy, begins with Chapter 4, “The Library Is the City,” which tackles the Centro de Lectura, first established in Barcelona in 1859, and how [End Page 185] it transformed workers’ (collective) reading practices and molded them into ideal citizens. In “Catechism of Industry,” Vialette effectively examines various conduct manuals that not only targeted workers’ behaviors, but also offered specific teachings about the necessity of social stratification. This part presents a convincing and rigorous examination of what can be understood as institutionalized reading (the highly structured and controlled space of the Centro de Lectura acts as a “microsociety,” as Vialette demonstrates) and the profound pedagogical function of conduct manuals in determining the proletariat’s notions about class conflict and violent radicalism. Once again, Vialette compellingly engages the theory of the spectacle to argue how philanthropy throughout this period desperately sought to “exhibit” docile workers conforming to bourgeois interests. Part Three, Philanthropy and the Female Working Class, is composed of Chapters 6, “The Potential Not to Be,” and Chapter 7, “The Art of Dying Well,” which round...

Gender and the Question of Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: De-Essentializing Femininity in Ángela Barco's Fémina (1910)

Modernity, by definition, implies a break with the traditional order. In Spain, anxieties surrounding women's social roles in a constantly changing society became more acute as the country's modernization process problematized conventional, bourgeois conceptions of supposedly natural gender differences. This study explores the ways in which Ángela Barco, a writer who despite some notoriety during her life is practically unknown today, represents the relationship between gender and modernity in her short novel Fémina. I analyze the ways in which the notion of an essential and immutable feminine nature is problematized in the novel as well as the ways in which the novel positions this question within the larger context of Spain's modernization. Furthermore, I argue that the novel, by revealing that gender differences are socially constructed rather than natural, exposes that the very notion of the "Natural," on which the subordination of women to male authority was legitimated, is itself socially determined. In doing so, the novel raises questions not only about a woman's role in modern Spanish society but also about a woman writer's role in the modernization of Spanish literature.

Regional prices in early twentieth-century Spain: a country-product-dummy approach

This paper explores regional price variation in early twentieth-century Spain. Using consumer price information from the bulletins published by the Instituto de Reformas Sociales between 1910 and 1920, we build a dataset with a total of 40,581 quotes covering 22 items for each of the 49 provinces. We then estimate provincial price levels following a country-product-dummy (CPD) approach. Our findings suggest that spatial price variation existed across Spanish provinces. In line with the Balassa–Samuelson conjecture, consumer prices and productivity levels were somewhat related. Additionally, it is shown that prices rose in all provinces after the outbreak of World War I. Even more, it appears that this demand-shock brought about spatial asymmetries in price growth.

Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura by Leslie J. Harkema

Reviewed by: Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura by Leslie J. Harkema José Luis Venegas Harkema, Leslie J. Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth:From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura. U of Toronto P, 2017. 292 pp. Borges once described James Joyce as being "menos un literato que una literatura" (Borges, Obras completas 4 251). In the same spirit, Leslie Harkema's new book successfully demonstrates that Miguel de Unamuno is much more than just an iconic figure of the so-called Generation of 1898. Unveiling a neglected literary network between the venerable Rector of the University of Salamanca and the younger poets of the Generation of 1927, Harkema dispenses with the generational paradigm to map out the development of literary culture in early twentieth-century Spain. Youth as a literary, philosophical, and cultural idea bridges the gap between Unamuno's response to the hoary structures of Restoration Spain in the late 1800s and the avant-garde impulse that seized the intellectual elite gathered around Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes in the 1920s. In exploring the transmission of this idea, Harkema traces an arc connecting Unamuno, the Generation of 27 (known at the time as la joven literatura), and European modernism. Spanish modernism thus becomes the critical frame that repositions Unamuno and la joven literatura in a comparative and transnational context unencumbered by tired generational labels. In the introduction, Harkema considers the different meanings that youth took on in Spain and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Engaged with wider cultural contexts while never losing sight of Unamuno, she contends that in diverse, and sometimes contrasting ways, youth is a "lyrical state" through which Spanish modernists resist the chronological and linear understandings of modernity found in, for example, Hegel and the Bildungsroman (5). In a rich chapter one, [End Page 1022] Harkema develops these insights to show how Unamuno's key ideas regarding literary form, national identity, and historical development cannot be fully understood without an examination of his opinions about youth. His critique of progress and linear time hinge on key concepts such as intrahistoria, poesis, and pistis, which, Harkema explains, converge on the creative energy of youth and the rejection of rigid teleology and cold rationality. The following chapters analyze the reception of Unamuno's "poetics of youth" among a younger group of writers who cut their literary teeth at the Residencia de Estudiantes. Chapter two highlights the impact on this group of Unamuno's Ensayos, a selection of essays edited by the Residencia press in the mid-1910s. Harkema places José Moreno Villa, who helped edit this collection, in dialogue with Unamuno to offer a nuanced interpretation of the apolitical commitment to aesthetic purity that permeated the Residencia. Harkema stresses Unamuno's influence on Moreno Villa's El pasajero (1914) and other writings. Rather than ignoring the social and political conflicts that plagued Spanish and European society at the time, Moreno Villa, taking his cue from Unamuno, sublimates them into an abstract reflection on human existence, as well as on the tension between youthful vitality and impending mortality, creation and destruction, life and death. Moreno Villa represents the Residencia's insularity, but also the residentes' capacity to grapple with "the relationship between youth and art, and incorporate the perspective of the adolescent, that recent product of modernity, into their own artistic creation" (135). Chapter three elaborates on these insights by showing how Unamuno sparked the politicization of la joven literatura against the background of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship (1923-30). A staunch critic of the regime, Unamuno went into exile but remained a point of reference for the younger poets who organized the three-hundredth anniversary of Góngora's death in 1927. His refusal to attend the event at the organizers' request has been interpreted as evidence of the rift between the older, politically-aware writer and the young aesthetes. Harkema challenges this view by arguing that Unamuno's poetic and political ideas, which cannot be divorced from the overarching notion of youth, "were very present in the younger writers' work, before and, increasingly, after 1927" (139). To substantiate this claim...

Patrias primitivas. Discursos e imágenes de la naturaleza en el primer conservacionismo español

Los orígenes de los Parques Nacionales y otras reservas proporcionan una oportunidad historiográfica para investigar diversos procesos científicos, culturales y sociales en la España de principios del XX. Por un lado, en España la conservación, al igual que en otros países occidentales, se originó en estrecha relación con las típicas preocupaciones finiseculares en torno a decadencias sociales y nacionales, especialmente en cuanto a las amenazas derivadas de la industrialización y la urbanización. Por otro lado, si bien el clima regeneracionista propiciaba un amplio movimiento de signo reformista y modernizador, también se trataba de recuperar y fortalecer una maltrecha identidad nacional. Así, la creación y los primeros pasos de los Parques y otras iniciativas conservacionistas estuvieron muy ligados al desarrollo de discursos ideológicos e imágenes culturales en torno a los Parques, los paisajes y la fauna salvaje de España, entendidos como poderosos reservorios de virtudes cívicas y de símbolos para la identidad nacional.

No laughing matter? The ethics of racial humor in Tres sombreros de copa

ABSTRACTMiguel Mihura's Tres sombreros de copa is often celebrated as an irresistibly funny critique of the values of the bourgeoisie in early twentieth-century Spain. Yet the enjoyment of some (myself included) is tempered by a discomfort at the handful of references to race and blackness in the play. Drawing on an approach to the ethics of humor that recognizes its performative aspect, this article considers several productions of Mihura's comedy from 1983 to 2011 and analyzes the various ways in which they do or do not engage with the potentially “racist” humor of the published text and with the issue of how to perform the character of Buby on stage.

Domestic Fiction and Cursilería in the Fin-de-Siècle Novellas of Salomé Núñez y Topete

Fashion guru, author of at least ten feuilletons and collected short stories, and a constant contributor to Hispanic press, Salomé Núñez y Topete (c.1859–1931) barely features in literary studies. Yet she knew Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, Concha Espina and Blanca de los Ríos, often publishing in the same periodicals and working on joint feminist and cultural initiatives. The primary purpose of this article is to initiate Núñez y Topete's recovery as a prominent professional writer in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain, focusing on her fin-de-siècle novellas, serialized works of domestic fiction. The second objective is to examine how domestic fiction intersects with the cursi, a bourgeois construction that mirrored the fragility of middle-class identities in Restoration Spain. My analysis of Núñez y Topete's works extends scholarship on the cursi in the Spanish fin-de-siècle context, which has concentrated almost exclusively on male writers. The cursi was also imbricated in contemporary debates around what constituted sham and genuine culture, the retrograde and modern, and ultimately, foreign imitation and Spanish realist original. Núñez y Topete's novellas critique the sociocultural fractures that engendered the cursi and debate competing middle-class models for personal happiness and national advancement.