ABSTRACT
Scholarly interest in nineteenth-century Spain has embraced a wide variety of texts, subjects, and issues, and yet it has been often heavily dependent on a positivist epistemology—the cataloguing and critical description of the material studied—and the epistemological preeminence given to the nation-state with its identification with one language organizing most of the work on the period. Most overviews on the nineteenth century in Spain not only take for granted the inclusions and exclusions imposed by the nation-state, but also provide the metanarrative that legitimizes it. The correlation between language and nation at the core of critical practices studying history, literatures, and cultures in the nineteenth century is not exclusive to the scholarship on Spain. The Modern Language Association’s decision to link Iberian Studies to Spanish in its new forum format is a case in point.
