Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History

The first critical analysis of the significance of emotions in Spanish culture

Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major component of social life—including in the nineteenth century, which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere.

The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms—political rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema, graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media—with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic implications.

Introduction: Engaging the Emotions—Theoretical, Historical, and Cultural Frameworks

Reasonable Sentiments: Sensibility and Balance in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Mónica Bolufer

"How Do I Love Thee": The Rhetoric of Patriotic Love in Early Puerto Rican Political Discourse
Wadda C. Ríos-Font

Emotional Readings for New Interpretative Communities in the Nineteenth Century: Agustán Pérez Zaragoza's Galería fúnebre (1831)
Pura Fernández

Emotional Contagion in a Time of Cholera: Sympathy, Humanidad, and Hygiene in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Spain
Rebecca Haidt

"Hatred Alone Warms the Heart": Figures of Ill Repute in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Novel
Lou Charnon-Deutsch

"You Will Have Observed that I Am Not Mad": Emotional Writings inside the Asylum
Rafael Huertas

A Sentient Landscape: Cinematic Experience in 1920s Spain
Juli Highfill

The Battle for Emotional Hegemony in Republican Spain (1931-1936)
Javier Krauel

Love in Times of War: Female Frigidity and Libertarian Revolution in the Work of Anarchist Doctor Félix Martí Ibáñez
Maite Zubiaurre

From the History of Emotions to the History of Experience: A Republican Sailor's Sketchbook in the Civil War
Javier Moscoso

Affective Variations: Queering Hispanidad in Luis Cernuda's Mexico
Enrique Álvarez

Sentimentality as Consensus: Imagining Galicia in the Democratic Period
Helena Miguélez-Carballeira

Emotional Competence and the Discourses of Suffering in the Television Series Amar en tiempos revueltos
Jo Labanyi

From Tear to Pixel: Political Correctness and Digital Emotions in the Exhumation of Mass Graves from the Civil War
Francisco Ferrándiz

Public Tears and Secrets of the Heart: Political Emotions in a State of Crisis
Luisa Elena Delgado

Afterword: Shameless Emotions
Antonio Muñoz Molina