Cristina Delano

Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco was nineteenth-century Spain's most prominent serial novelist. Ayguals de Izco was a committed liberal, and he used his literary works to spread his political ideology. From 1846-1848, Ayguals published El Tigre del Haestrazgo, the story of the infamous Carlist general Ramon Cabrera. Cabrera was responsible for the death of Ayguals's brother in the First Carlist War. After the war, Carlist historiographers published a biography that portrayed Cabrera as a noble military hero. Ayguals was infuriated by this exaltation of his brother's executor and decided to publish his own account of Cabrera's exploits. This essay analyzes how Ayguals creates a Gothic childhood for Cabrera to discredit both the hagiography of the General and the Carlist movement. Ayguals uses Gothic archetypes to characterize young Cabrera and contrast him with values of Spain's middle classes. Ayguals uses the signs of Gothic literature to incite a negative emotional response in his readers that would lead his readers to reject Carlist ideology.

In 1898, Galdos inaugurated the Third Series of the Episodios Nacionales with the publication of Zumalacarregui. Published in the midst of the escalating conflict with the United States, Galdos's novel revisits the foundational crisis of the liberal nation state: the First Carlist War. Galdos embeds the reader in the Carlist army through the point of view of Jose Fago, a military chaplain who abandons ecclesiastical life to become a soldier in an attempt to imitate his hero, the famed General Zumalacarregui. The tension between Fago's vocation and his frustrated desire for military glory provokes a crisis of identity and masculinity, which reveals Fago's emotionality. Dierdra Reber has proposed that the dominant episteme of the modern age is based on feelings, rather than logic; the thinking head of the Cartesian episteme has been replaced by the body that "thinks" by feeling. This essay analyzes how Galdos critiques Carlism through Fago's affective understanding of the war and the Cause. Galdos portrays Fago as a subject suffering from the "effects" of Carlism, a system that causes "malestar," both emotionally and physically, for its followers.

This essay examines Antonio Muñoz Molina´s use of the Gothic mode and the misterio genre to destabilize Madrid's image as a politicized symbol of cultural modernity in his 1992 novel Los misterios de Madrid. The novel was a return to the form and function of the nineteenth-century urban mystery novel. The year 1992 was one of celebrations throughout Spain, and Madrid was designated the 1992 European Capital of Culture (ECOC). The ECOC title was meant to signal Spain's graduation to democratic modernity and its new identity as a European capital. Madrid of Muñoz Molina contests this politicization of Madrid´s identity by gothicizing the capital. This Madrid is enigmatic and threatening, and it is the home of the conspiracies that undermine the capital's new image. In a year that celebrated Madrid's entree into European modernity, Muñoz Molina uses nineteenth-century literary modes to question Madrid's success story.