Bodies of Disorder: Gender and Degeneration in Baroja and Blasco Ibanez

Discourses of degeneration (social, political, medical) peaked in the 1890s, and posited the decline, even sterility of white European races. In early-twentieth-century Spain, the novels of Baroja and Blasco Ibanez both assimilated and subverted cultural myths of degeneration that were fuelled by influential European theorists such as Morel, Lombroso and Nordau. In the light of widespread anxieties around reproduction and racial decadence, Murphy traces the creative tension between each author's literary representations of the degenerate female body and the profitable market provided by women readers in an evolving consumer society. 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 Pio Baroja and English Literature (2004), she has published widely on Comparative Literature and Spanish Modernism.