Communities of Feeling: Literature, Sociability, and Emotions in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hispanic World

Fernández-Blázquez, Ana; Fernández-Blázquez, Ana

Scholarship in the history of emotions and affect theory has, since the late twentieth century, reshaped our understanding of literary and cultural production by displacing models of emotion as interior, psychological states in favor of approaches that conceptualize emotions as historically situated and socially organized practices. Foundational work by Raymond Williams (1977) and Barbara Rosenwein (2002; 2006) has been extended by affect theory, particularly Sara Ahmed (2004), which foregrounds the circulation of emotions as social and political forces, as well as by more recent philosophical accounts such as Andrea Scarantino (2024), which emphasize the dual natural and normative dimensions of emotional concepts. Within Hispanic studies, this line of inquiry has been consolidated by work such as Engaging the Emotions in Spanish Culture and History (Delgado, Fernández, and Labanyi 2016), which demonstrates the centrality of emotional practices to cultural and political life across periods and regions.

Work on the history of emotions has established the centrality of feeling to collective identities, political imaginaries, and forms of sociability, from Enlightenment salons and tertulias to nineteenth-century nation-building discourses, while also tracing the uneven distribution of emotional norms across gender, class, and race. The processes through which emotions become communal, reproducible, and portable across media and institutions remain less clearly defined. This session addresses that problem by focusing on the material and formal mediation of affect—on the conditions that make emotions iterable, transmissible, and socially binding.

Focusing on the Hispanic world from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, a period shaped by new emotional repertoires and expanding print and sociability networks, the panel treats literary forms as technologies of affect. Epistolary exchange, devotional writing, and print prose organize the circulation of feeling by embedding it in repeatable forms—letters, proverbs, bureaucratic formulae, refrains—that move across households, institutions, and publics. By placing Spain and Latin America in a single analytical frame, the session develops a transatlantic perspective that accounts for both shared forms and local configurations of emotional life.

The session will be chaired (Alberto Custodio Romero Vallejo) and will include a designated respondent (Ana Fernández-Blázquez), ensuring both coherence and sustained critical engagement. It will consist of three papers of approximately 12–15 minutes each. The respondent will then open with brief synthetic observations, allowing the bulk of the remaining session time to be reserved for open discussion among panelists and audience members, enhancing spontaneous exchange and debate.

Across distinct archives and genres, the papers collectively examine how emotional communities are produced through concrete practices of mediation. Late eighteenth-century epistolary culture among Spanish letrados—including Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and Leandro Fernández de Moratín—reveals how homosocial attachment emerges as a form of sociability in the wake of political disillusionment, with verse epistles and correspondence providing a medium for the articulation of shared affect outside normative domestic frameworks. In a different institutional context, women's convent writing in colonial Chile, read through Michel Foucault (1975; 1977), demonstrates how confessional regimes organized specific affective fields in which emotions such as guilt, fear, and obedience were cultivated, regulated, and negotiated, positioning the convent as an affective community structured by both discipline and agency. Finally, nineteenth-century print culture in Peru—exemplified by Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones peruanas—shows how emotions are formalized into portable textual devices (proverbs, refrains, juridical language) that circulate across social spaces, producing what may be understood as a "printed tertulia" and transforming individual responses into shared evaluative frameworks.

Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that emotions become communal not simply through shared experience but through their inscription in forms that enable circulation, repetition, and uptake across media and institutions. By bringing into dialogue Spain, Peru, and Chile; secular and religious contexts; and diverse methodological approaches (literary analysis, intellectual history, critical theory), the panel offers a comparative and interdisciplinary account of emotions as social practices. The panel's participants — Song No (Purdue University) and José María Rodríguez García (Duke University), both Associate Professors, and Yaisy Rodriguez (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), a PhD candidate — represent a range of career stages, institutional affiliations, and research specializations. The group also reflects gender diversity and spans distinct archival and geographical focuses within the Hispanic world, reinforcing the session's commitment to a transatlantic and methodologically plural understanding of the field.

564 Communities of Feeling: Literature, Sociability, and Emotions in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hispanic World: Calls for Papers