The Road to Perfection (Camino de Perfección) was written in 1901 and published the following year. It marked a pivotal point in Pío Baroja's development as a writer and thinker. It tells the story of Fernando Ossorio, a young man who makes a spiritual and physical journey through parts of central Spain.

The fraught tension between science and religion has loomed large in scholarship about the nineteenth century in Spain, especially given the prominence of the Catholic Church and the discoveries made by Wallace and Darwin. The struggle for epistemological superiority between these two discourses (science and religion) has served to overshadow certain corners of the cultural landscape that, though prominent sites of intellectual exploration in their day, have received comparatively less scholarly attention until recently. Fringe Discourses brings together a group of essays that seeks to restore a sense of the epistemological richness of nineteenth-century Spain. By exploring the relationship between epistemology, modernity, and subjectivity, these essays recover significant efforts by Spanish authors and intellectuals to explain human nature and their world, which seemed to be changing so radically before their eyes. In doing so the essays also reveal just how elastic the relationship was between science and pseudoscience, genius and quackery. Offering a veritable Wunderkammer, the authors collected here train their sights both on curious fields of study (from pogonolgy, the science of beards, to Spiritualism) and curiouser people (from a government spy on undercover assignment in Morocco dressed as a Moorish prince to a hypnotic huckster who dupes the queen regent). With other authors focusing on science fiction dystopias, mystical journeys, and anatomical symbology, Fringe Discourses reveals the Spanish nineteenth century for the intellectual Wild West it was.

The development of basic textual strategies in Spanish fiction from 1902 to 1926 is the focus of this study. Challenging traditional views of the relationships between the literature produced by the Generation of 1898 and the Spanish vanguard movement, Spires traces through analyses of select works a process of evolution beginning at the turn of the century and continuing into the 1920s. Spires demonstrates how the somewhat tentative strategies of the first decade became more daring in the second. As opposed to the extant historical, autobiographical, and thematic surveys of this period, Transparent Simulacra features structuralist and post-structuralist readings of fiction by Baroja, Azorín, Unamuno, Pérez de Ayala, Gómez de Serna, Jarnés, and Salinas. These approaches offer not only revisionist views of a literary period but also revisionist readings of some of Spain's best-known fiction.

This is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in Christian theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. It shows that early-twentieth-century authors, poets, and critics, including Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czesław Miłosz, actively engaged with the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians raging across Europe. These debates contributed to developing new ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and literature, and informed contemporary critical writings on aesthetics and poetics.

The two novels tell the story of Mara and her widowed father, Enrique Aracil, a physician, from her earliest years, sharing her life with family members and growing into womanhood. Her fathers involvement with the anarchist movement brings him in contact with a young fanatic Nilo Brull, who fails in a desperate attempt to assassinate the young king and his bride, throwing a bomb at their open carriage on their wedding day. Aracil is accused of abetting the bomber, and he and his daughter are forced to flee Madrid. The first novel follows the pair as they travel on foot and later on horseback through the countryside west of the city on their way to Portugal. The author describes in great detail all their adventures as they move from one town to the next, staying at inns and meeting the many characters on their way. It ends with their voyage by sea from Portugal to London. The second novel describes their stay in London, at a pension in Bloomsbury, and the various people they encounter while they remain in London. Baroja reveals the influence of his favorite author, Charles Dickens, throughout many picturesque scenes. When they consider its safe to return to Spain, they sail back, and Marie ends up marrying her cousin.