Description
Discourses of degeneration (social, political, medical) peaked in the 1890s across Europe, and posited the moral and biological decline, even sterility, of European nations. In early twentieth-century Spain, the novels of P o Baroja and Vicente Blasco Ib ez both assimilated and subverted the cultural myths of degeneration that were fuelled by influential European theorists such as B n dict Morel, Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau. In the light of widespread anxieties about reproduction and national decadence, this interdisciplinary book traces the creative tension between each author's literary representations of the degenerate female body and the consumer agency of women readers. Through its alignment of gender paradigms and degenerationism in Baroja and Blasco Ib ez, Bodies of Disorder offers a challenge to established hierarchies of canonical and popular fiction. Countering Baroja's resounding public disdain for his Valencian contemporary, Katharine Murphy repositions Blasco as markedly closer to the so-called 'Generation of 1898' than hitherto acknowledged.
Dr Katharine Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Exeter. Author of Re-reading P o Baroja and English Literature (2004), she has published widely on Comparative Literature and Spanish Modernism.
Author: Katharine Murphy
Publisher: Legenda
Published: 06/03/2019
Pages: 206
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.44d
ISBN13: 9781781884058
ISBN10: 1781884056
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Hispanic American Studies
- Literary Criticism | European | Spanish & Portuguese
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 20th Century
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