The activity of trafficking is inevitably and rightly associated with business (and with busyness). It is about the to and fro of exchanges, about barters, bargains, happenstance, opportunism. These characteristics constitute not only the activity of commerce, but are the vital part of cultural exchange. This book sets out to look at cultural trafficking in Spain, and in particular to look for what is dynamic, lively and imaginative in it. Spain in the early decades of the twentieth century engaged in dynamic and extremely complex types of cultural exchange with elsewhere. Its great (and obvious) trading ‘partner’ is Europe, yet...

‘Europe is elsewhere,’ notes Luisa Passerini (1999: 10–11), in relation to England’s attitude to the continent to which it belongs. The model she proposes of Europe is imaginative: it consists in a civilized culture based upon the assumptions and practices of courtly love. In her persuasive and vigorous study of England’s attitude to Europe in the interwar years, she details the varied aspects of this style of civilization. Subsequent writings on the topic have confirmed Passerini’s hypothesis, but, in the case of Spain, have also commented on difference (Sinclair 2010 forthcoming; Labanyi 2010 forthcoming). For Spain, Europe is a...

In the broad scheme of things, publishing books as a way of spreading culture is arguably much less cost-effective, or indeed in any way effective, than other mass media of culture. Jordana Mendelson’s work on the work of the periódico mural, for example, illustrates the immediacy and effect of print culture in a non-standard situation (Mendelson 2007). If you engage in propaganda, then, as Carmelo Garitaonandía points out, non-book publishing is likely to be far more effective than what can be achieved by engagement in the book trade (Garitaonandía 1989: 166). Not only posters on walls, but the radio and...

As observed by Collini (1991: 56), the activity of journals, and specifically that of the journal essay, is something that constructs an imagined intellectual community in a highly specific way, in that it assumes that the reader has read what has gone before. Only subtle hints and references are needed, therefore, to allude to an accumulating body of knowledge (and, one might assume, a canon of accepted ideas and discourses). The process of ongoing creation of a group of participants is different, more intense and dynamic than the activity of publishing houses, and the way in which it is able...

What does it signify to be an anglophile? More specifically, what did it signify to be an anglophile in Spain in the early twentieth century? Some pointers to the significance of England for Spain in this period have been given. What Collini has to say on the nature and functioning of the intellectual, as discussed in Chapter 1, is relevant here, given that he envisages the intellectual as having a ‘qualifying performance’ that subsequently endows him with authority to pronounce on topics outside his field (Collini 2006: 52–6). This apparent championing of amateurism, in contradistinction to the concept of...

In this chapter I shall examine a second case of identification and desire. In a cultural love-affair located largely in the imaginary, Russia constituted a masculine Other, a desired and exotic brother for Spain, while its revolution provided the possibility of a realistic engagement with a different culture. But there was a further gendered dimension. The imaginary that concerned England and Englishness had had its primary focus on the concept of the gentleman, the amateur or the eccentric (with only brief excursions into feminine aspects of the cultural imaginary). The imaginary that concerns Russia is one that also involves the...

Cultural trafficking in Spain was not restricted to the crossing of national borders. This much in a sense is evident throughout the discussions so far, in that the selection of works for publication, whether in book form or through the medium of a journal, implies the crossing of an internal border. But there are more precise internal questions to be explored.

As announced in Chapter 1, the greater part of my emphasis so far has been upon urban activity and upon Madrid, albeit with a consciousness of the significance of activity within the regions, not least in Catalonia. Using the...

In early twentieth-century Spain the purveying of cultural capital to the pueblos by the Misiones Pedagógicas stands as an icon, and the provision of the Bibliotecas Populares a specific example of how they set out to make a lasting difference to the inhabitants of the pueblos. An initial figure of 3,506 pueblos that received libraries through this activity (Misiones Pedagógicas 1934: xxi) would grow so that, by June 1936, 5,522 villages had been reached by the libraries (Salaberria Lizarazu 2006: 306), an increase of 57.5 per cent.

The activity of the Misiones Pedagógicas extended well beyond the setting up of...

A driving force in writing this book was the conviction that there was a wealth of intellectual history that risked being lost through a process of cultural desmemoria. It was coupled with another conviction, namely that if we only looked at the histories of individuals, or those of institutions, we missed something. The interactive nature of individuals with one another, and with their institutions, is as significant an element in the trafficking of knowledge as is any single interaction of either with the outside world.

These interactions are challenging to map, but the preceding chapters have aimed to capture different...