Foregrounding gender, social class and medicine, this book analyses literary representations of physical and psychological illness in Spanish fiction from 1900 to 1955.


The book begins by examining narratives of individual and collective ill-health in Spain during the first half of the twentieth century, including theories of neurosis in the early fiction of Pío Baroja, followed by crowd violence in Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's Sangre y arena and Carmen de Burgos' advocacy for women's health in La rampa. The second half of the book traces the echoes, afterlives and transformations of turn-of-the-century biological discourses in narratives of illness in post-Civil War novels. Case studies include therapeutic bathing in Carmen Martín Gaite's El balneario and symbols of paralysis in Jesús Fernández Santos' Los bravos.

Reframing the emphasis on socio-political readings that has dominated scholarship of both 'Generation of 1898' and post-war writers, this study aims to re-contextualise Spanish literature of the period through an interdisciplinary focus on the novels' wide-ranging engagements with gendered, ideological and symbolic interpretations of pathology. The book examines the significance of the literary assimilation and transformation of medical discourses through critical interpretations of storytelling in the context of health and ill-health, thereby seeking to reposition narrative fiction in early to mid-twentieth-century Spain as examples of the emerging category of Sick Literature.

On publication, this book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND. The open access version of this publication was enabled through UKRI Open Access Monograph funds.