ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the moderantismo which emerges as hegemonic both politically and culturally in Isabelline Spain arises more from real transformations in Spanish society than it does from unbroken continuities in institutions and behaviors carried over from the antiguo regimen. The particular vision of the community of national subjects which eventually wins hegemony is deeply grounded in religious forms of subjectivity. The chapter seeks to restore a class dimension to people understanding of capitalist transformation in nineteeth-century Spain. Nationalism is indeed about the organization of capitalist society. The cultural signficance of the 1840s for the development of Spanish literature includes the transformation of fundamentally religious sensibilities into secular sensibilities by means of the elaboration of a specific aesthetic ideology. Traidor responds to the social turmoil of the year 1848 both in Spain and throughout Europe by seeking to produce a literary image of "peaceable" subjectivity in keeping with moderado ideology.
