| The loss of the overseas provinces to the United States at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898 ended Spain's image of itself as a colonial power. The conventional representation of this self-image had emphasized as inherent traits of the Spanish people concepts such as courage and heroism in combat and the notion of individual honor based upon social reputation. Popularized in consumable literature, this image embodied a residual stage in the course of Spanish history, one that more appropriately illustrated the feudal-aristocratic rather than the modern. Yet Spain in the 1890s was an emergent preindustrial society replete with the problems associated with that stage. Because the year 1898 is said to be a year of "disaster," one that originated in military and political failure, it is thus intimately related to this feudal-aristocratic image of what it meant to be a Spaniard. The question then arises as to what happened to this image following the lightening defeat of warrior Spain by its opposite, the very bourgeois United States.;A survey of one outstanding surveyor of consumable literature demonstrates the pervasiveness of this prewar feudal-aristocratic self-image. As a consumer-oriented periodical, Blanco y Negro took great care to increase its circulation by offering readers conventional and nonthreatening images. By using as data articles, stories, and drawings about the military, colonies, and war which were published in Blanco y Negro between 1893 and 1903, this dissertation traces the course of the conventional image through the historical events. Chapter One examines in detail the prewar incidence of the image as a conventional and uncritical ideology originating in historical and class tradition. Chapter Two examines the year of the disaster by detailing the reality of war as well as the continuation or reformulation of the feudal-aristocratic. Chapter Three looks at the attempts to deal with the disparity between reality and image between 1899 and 1903. The conclusion summarizes the course of the two opposing images, the residual and the emergent bourgeois, from 1893 to 1903. |
