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Abstract:The nineteenth-century novel is generally seen as depicting the friction between the characters' inner desires and the demands of society. This supposes that nineteenth-century realism retains the view of emotions as the expression of the inner self that developed in the Romantic period. Taking Galdós's 1884 novel Tormento as a case study, I propose that the realist novel anticipates contemporary emotion theory in its understanding of the emotions as relational, while, in the case of Tormento, also looking back to earlier emotional regimes. This view of Tormento as an emotional palimpsest is argued by reference to the theorization of the emotions by Monique Scheer, Eva Illouz and Sara Ahmed.Resumen:La novela realista decimonónica suele ser interpretada como la representación del conflicto entre los deseos íntimos de los personajes y las exigencias de la sociedad, lo cual significaría que el realismo decimonónico se atiene a la idea, desarrollada en la época romántica, de que las emociones son la expresión del yo interior. Mediante la consideración de la novela galdosiana Tormento, de 1884, propongo que la novela realista anticipa la visión relacional de las emociones que ha sido elaborada por la teoría de las emociones en la actualidad. Al mismo tiempo, veremos cómo Tormento se hace eco de regímenes emocionales anteriores. El análisis del resultante palimpsesto emocional se basará en la teorización de las emociones de Monique Scheer, Eva Illouz y Sara Ahmed.

This article argues against the idea that the Spanish transition to democracy was characterized by a pacto del olvido[pact of oblivion], insisting that lack of discussion in the public sphere is not the same thing as forgetting. It also argues against the applicability of trauma theory, which has been so important in Holocaust studies, to an understanding of the effects of the Francoist repression (during and after the Spanish CivilWar) on its victims and their relatives, suggesting that their refusal to speak about their suffering, and to pass its memory onto later generations, is best understood in political rather than psychoanalytical terms. The article draws on the work of the Italian cultural historian Luisa Passerini, taking up her invitation to ‘learn to listen to silence’. Through discussion of a number of personal case histories, it challenges the notion that silence necessarily represents a lack of memory or conformism, and examines the ways in which silence can itself represent a form of witnessing and commitment. The discussion is set in the context of the memory debates that have occurred in Spain in recent years, most notably around the passage through parliament in 2006–7 of the Socialist Government’s ‘Memory Law’ (as it became nicknamed in the media), noting the importance for these debates of the discourses about the violent past in postdictatorial Chile and Argentina.

It has been suggested that the modern city, which bombards its inhabitants with a rapid succession of fragmentary visual images, trained its city-dwellers in the viewing habits required by the cinema. This article explores the dual fascination with urban life and the cinema in the Spanish avant-garde of the late 1920s, in the light of Huyssen’s suggestion that the avant-garde was a reaction against modernism’s attempt to distance itself from the rise of mass culture which accompanied urbanization. While drawing on Bourdieu’s distinction between high and popular culture in terms of their different modes of consumption, the article notes that Bourdieu’s equation of popular culture with realism forgets the importance of spectacle in popular culture. It is argued that the fascination with urban spectacle in the Spanish avant-garde allows a (sometimes ambivalent) collapsing of high and popular culture. This is effected through an exploration of the materiality of modern urban life, which coexists with – rather than opposing – the abstraction of the modern market economy. Works discussed include literary texts by Lorca, Ayala, Gómez de la Serna, and Arconada; films by Buñuel and Dalí, Giménez Caballero, Perojo, and a film script by Lorca; and (briefly) paintings by Mallo.

The first part of this introduction (by Jo Labanyi) outlines the objectives of this special issue and draws readers’ attention to the key debates in the essays that follow. It emphasizes the aim of critiquing models of empire that operate within the framework of the nation state, and suggests alternative models that recognize transnational processes and that show the decolonization process to be more complex than an opposition between ‘old’ and ‘new’ nations. The second part (by Ross G. Forman) assesses some of the ways in which the articles in this volume contribute to recent critical developments in the study of imperialism and postcoloniality. It stresses the benefits of understanding imperial and post-imperial historiographies from a comparative vantage and foregrounds the centrality of cultural production to evolving theories about the relationship between European powers and their former possessions overseas.

Speaking the Yearningbell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Turnaround, 1991, £7.99Poisoned StoriesRosario Ferre, The Youngest Doll, introd. Jean Franco, University of Nebraska Press, $10.95.Reading with CixousVerena Andermatt Conley, Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine, expanded edition, University of Nebraska Press, £17.95 hbk, £6.95 pbk.Helene Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, edited, translated and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvester Wheatsheaf, £35 hbk, £9.95 pbk.Helen Wilcox, Keith McWatters, Ann Thompson and Linda R. Williams (eds), The Body and the Text: Helene Cixous, Reading and Teaching, Harvester Wheatsheaf, £40 hbk, £10.95 bk.The Feminist EmbodimentLaurence Goldstein (ed.), 'The Female Body (Part One), A Special Issue', Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume XXIX, no. 4, Fall 1990, $6.Lynn Hunt (ed.), Eroticism and the Body Politic, The Johns Hopkins University Press,Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830-1908, Cambridge University Press. £14.95 hbk.

Ten years after Franco's death, Spanish libraries still suffer the effects of 40 years’ censorship

Ten years after Franco's death, Spanish libraries still suffer the effects of 40 years' censorship