Discourses of degeneration (social, political, medical) peaked in the 1890s, and posited the decline, even sterility of white European races. In early-twentieth-century Spain, the novels of Baroja and Blasco Ibanez both assimilated and subverted cultural myths of degeneration that were fuelled by influential European theorists such as Morel, Lombroso and Nordau. In the light of widespread anxieties around reproduction and racial decadence, Murphy traces the creative tension between each author s literary representations of the degenerate female body and the profitable market provided by women...