The fraught tension between science and religion has loomed large in scholarship about the nineteenth century in Spain, especially given the prominence of the Catholic Church and the discoveries made by Wallace and Darwin. The struggle for epistemological superiority between these two discourses (science and religion) has served to overshadow certain corners of the cultural landscape that, though prominent sites of intellectual exploration in their day, have received comparatively less scholarly attention until recently. Fringe Discourses brings together a group of essays that seeks to restore a sense of the epistemological richness of nineteenth-century Spain. By exploring the relationship between epistemology, modernity, and subjectivity, these essays recover significant efforts by Spanish authors and intellectuals to explain human nature and their world, which seemed to be changing so radically before their eyes. In doing so the essays also reveal just how elastic the relationship was between science and pseudoscience, genius and quackery. Offering a veritable Wunderkammer, the authors collected here train their sights both on curious fields of study (from pogonolgy, the science of beards, to Spiritualism) and curiouser people (from a government spy on undercover assignment in Morocco dressed as a Moorish prince to a hypnotic huckster who dupes the queen regent). With other authors focusing on science fiction dystopias, mystical journeys, and anatomical symbology, Fringe Discourses reveals the Spanish nineteenth century for the intellectual Wild West it was.
Introduction, Alicia Cerezo Paredes and Ryan A. Davis Chapter 1: The Artful Science of Ali Bey, Travis Landry Chapter 2: Jose de Letamendi, Symbolic Humanity and Contexts for the Individual in Nineteenth-Century Spain, Dale J. Pratt Chapter 3: Pogonology, Physiognomy, and the Face of Spanish Masculinity, Collin McKinney Chapter 4: Hysteria and Couvade in Los pazos de Ulloa and Su unico hijo, Kevin Larsen Chapter 5: The Saint and the Hysteric: Mysticism in Nazarin and Dulce Dueno, Elizabeth Smith Rousselle Chapter 6: The Reception of Charles Darwin in Spain and the Problem of Abulia in Pio Baroja's Camino de Perfeccion, Jerry Hoeg Chapter 7: Darwin in Spain: Evolutionary Theory in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Spanish Science Fiction Narratives, Juan Carlos Martin Chapter 8: Business of the Heart: Candida Sanz's Future-making in the Spiritualist Monthly Constancia (1879-1884), Marta Ferrer Gomez Chapter 9: "Hypnotism and the Epistemological Limits of Modernity: Alberto de Das and Leopoldo Alas," Ryan A. Davis
