Spanish Culture from Romanticism to the Present

Structures of Feeling makes available two decades of work by the pioneering scholar of Spanish cultural studies, Jo Labanyi, covering literature, cinema, painting, photography, and memory studies, with a frequent focus on gender. The essays explore the ways in which cultural texts serve as a vehicle for negotiating cultural anxieties, through their encoding of emotional structures that reveal social tensions and contradictions. The discussion of a wide range of Spanish texts, from the early nineteenth-century to the present, traces stages in the history of the emotions and their imbrication in political processes. The essays have in common an attempt to read against the grain; in many cases, the focus on gender is what makes that possible.

Jo Labanyi is a Fellow of the British Academy, and the founding editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. She is now Professor of Spanish at New York University.