How was the female body perceived in the popular culture of late nineteenth-century Spain? Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Lou Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture.

Charnon-Deutsch organizes the 190 images reproduced in this book into six broad categories, or "fictions of the feminine": she reads women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a...

Spanish Gypsy--the words themselves conjure up the sound of castanets, heels tapping the floor, plaintive yet passionate singing, and the unforgettable sight of a seductive figure, back arched, skirts swirling, dancing with fierce grace. This stereotype has been all but synonymous with Spain since the nineteenth century, and there are no signs that her power as a national icon is on the wane. Surprising as it may seem, The Spanish Gypsy by Lou Charnon-Deutsch, the well-known Hispanist, is the first comprehensive history of this icon, associated in the European imagination with...

Hold That Pose explores the role of visual images in Spain's transition to a fully modern illustrated press by the first decade of the twentieth century. It examines both the ideological impact and the technological transformation of image production in Spanish magazines during the Restoration. In the brief period of forty years, 1870 to 1910, technological and manufacturing advances revolutionized Spain's illustrated press and consequently Europeanized the tastes and the expectations of its elite urban readership. By 1900, once subscription prices fell and magazines began to...