ABSTRACT

Drawing on the theorization by Luisa Passerini and Kyla Schuller of Eurocentric notions that linked racial superiority to emotional refinement, the article will trace a substratum of biopolitical thinking across a range of Spanish texts from the 1830s to the 1880s. The use of medieval settings in Romantic historical fiction will be related to the contemporaneous belief that courtly love was the basis of European civilization. I will then explore how the concept of “impressibility” as the basis of moral improvement, derived from Lamarckian evolutionary theory, underpins a variety of literary and reform writings. I argue that these texts, which place the female capacity for sentiment at their center, are the other side of a biopolitical construction of class and race hierarchies.

摘要

借鉴路易莎·帕塞里尼（Luisa Passerini）和凯拉·舒勒（Kyla Schuller）对欧洲中心思想的理论化，这些思想将种族优势与情感改善联系起来，该文章将追溯1830年代至1880年代一系列西班牙文本中生物政治思想的底层。在浪漫主义历史小说中使用中世纪环境将与当代认为宫廷爱情是欧洲文明的基础有关。然后，我将探讨拉马克进化论派生的“不可打动”作为道德改善基础的概念如何支撑各种文学和改革著作。我认为这些文本以女性的情感能力为中心，是阶级和种族等级制度生物政治建设的另一面。