ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the works of the Spanish author and diplomat Angel Ganivet with a special focus on his literary production connected to both spatial and temporal dimensions of European and Western modernity. Ganivet’s travel letters, Cartas finlandesas (Finnish letters), published between 1896 and 1898, represent a mapping of Nordic/Scandinavian Europe from a Spanish and southern European point of view. Angel Ganivet is generally referred to as a precursor to the Spanish Generation of ’98, a literary and intellectual generation concerned with domestic social and political questions who participated in a Spanish national self-conceptualisation. The modernisation or secularisation of Western time, or at least of what we can refer to as a Western time conceptualisation, is a dominating feature of the nineteenth century. Ganivet sketched a conflict between a perceived Pan-Latininst tradition and an Anglo-Saxon modernity, South against North. This clash also implied considerable dimensions of chronopolitics.
