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About this book
The concept of vital force - the immanent energy that promotes the processes of life in the body and in nature - has proved a source of endless fascination and controversy. Indeed, the question of what vitalizes the body has haunted humanity since antiquity, and became even more pressing during the Scientific Revolution and beyond.
Examining the complexities and theories about vital force in Spanish modernity, Nicolás Fernández-Medina’s Life Embodied offers a novel and provocative assessment of the question of bodily life in Spain. Starting with Juan de Cabriada’s landmark Carta filosófica, médico-chymica of 1687 and ending with Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s avant-gardism of the 1910s, Fernández-Medina incorporates discussions of anatomy, philosophy, science, critical theory, history of medicine, and literary studies to argue that concepts of vital force served as powerful vehicles to interrogate the possibilities and limits of corporeality. Paying close attention to how the body’s capabilities were conceived and strategically woven into critiques of modernity, Fernández-Medina engages the work of Miguel Boix y Moliner, Martín Martínez, Diego de Torres Villarroel, Sebastián Guerrero Herreros, Ignacio María Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Pedro Mata y Fontanet, Ángela Grassi, Julián Sanz del Río, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pío Baroja, among others.
Drawing on extensive research and analysis, Life Embodied breaks new ground as the first book to address the question of vital force in Spanish modernity.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Copyright
- Contents
- Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Life, Critique, Modernity: Vital Force and the (Un)certainty of Science
- PART ONE Blood, Circulation, and the Soul
- 1 The Heart of the Matter: Remapping the Body Economy in Juan de Cabriada’s Philosophical Medico-Chemical Letter
- 2 Cartesianism and Its Discontents: Marcelino Boix y Moliner, Martín Martínez, and Diego de Torres Villarroel
- PART TWO Political Reform and the Order of Nature
- 3 Vitalizing the Medical Revolution in Spain; or, How Sebastián Miguel Guerrero Herreros and Ignacio María Ruiz de Luzuriaga Theorized Life, Death, and Everything in Between
- 4 The Subjective Self and the Sublimity of Nature’s Vital Force in Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos
- PART THREE From Neo-Hippocratism to the Avant-Garde
- 5 Pursuing the Modern at the End of an Age: Positivist Materialism and the Krausist Ideal in Pedro Mata y Fontanet and Julián Sanz del Río
- 6 Degeneration, Regeneration, Corporealization: What the Lived Body Can Do According to Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index