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THE fruitful relationship of interdisciplinary studies linking the social sciences to the humanities provides fertile ground for a reconsideration of Modernism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. While current historiography reassesses the longstanding though flawed interpretation of a "unique" Spanish history isolated from the rest of Western Europe,1 recent scholarship by Mary Lee Bretz and Christopher C. Soufas Jr., among others, questions the narrow and elitist generational concept that divides Spanish culture into two distinct movements: the Generation of 1898 and modernismo.2 Spain's exclusion from prior studies of international Modernism can be attributed to a convergence of both external and internal factors. The persistent "othering" of Spain by European nations throughout the modern era, Bretz contends, coincides in the twentieth century with an "inward-looking, xenophobic vision" advanced by Spanish conservatives after the Civil War to redefine national culture with a single voice and through a single perspective (20). This traditionalist critical line, upheld by Dámaso Alonso, Pedro Laín Entralgo, Pedro Salinas and others, concurs Soufas, ultimately served to "repudiate the presence of Modernism in Spain" (465).3 The artificial categorization by generation, he continues, was an attempt by conservative scholars to make pre-civil war literature compatible with the "ultra-nationalist, authoritarian ideology of the Franco dictatorship" (466). Post-war criticism stressed both national separateness and difference and, as a result, disassociated Spanish intellectuals and artists from their larger European context.4 Consequently, this purposeful dismissal of Modernism in Spain by scholars throughout the past century, what Soufas terms the "unmaking" of Spanish Modernism, has determined, and thus distorted, our critical approach to early twentieth-century texts for many decades. Informed by these current historical, cultural, and literary revisions of an imagined tradition, this essay, then, proposes not only to "remake" the presence of Modernism in three short stories by Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), but also to situate these elements within the broader context of European modernist aesthetics.
Anyone remotely familiar with the life and the work of Pardo Bazán is well aware of the many ironies that abound not only within her biography but also within her fiction. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that this multi-faceted woman who defies all simplistic definitions has, with such indifference, been categorized and labeled as one of "Spain's greatest Naturalist authors"...