Founders of the Future

In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial productionparticularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and workto produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nations productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazn, Concha Espina, Benito Prez Galds, Vicente Blasco Ibez, and Jos Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spains process of modernization.