‘Yo procedo por explosión violenta y ruidosamente’: Rereading the Political in Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s fin-de-siècle Journalistic Production

The Contagious Effects of Rural Violence: Social Pathologies and Injured Bodies in Blasco Ibáñez’s <em>La barraca</em> (<em>The Cabin</em>)

“…Set in Jerez de la Frontera, Andalucía, La bodega focuses on the degenerate qualities of bourgeois wine merchants, while La horda sets out the diseased conditions of poverty in working-class districts of Madrid, with an ideological aim to expose injustice. In a recent article on Blasco Ibáñez's Republican journalism, Cameron (2018) reclaims the overtly political agenda of his Valencian novels, in which the exploitation of the proletariat is one of the author's prime targets in Restoration Spain . 2 Building on Cameron's renewed critical emphasis on the political impetus of the author's early fiction, this article scrutinises Blasco Ibáñez's exposition of contagious violence and injured bodies in La barraca, in order to explore the ways in which the novel's representations of pathology (social, moral and physical) inform both its ideological perspective and its visual evocations of landscape.…”