AFTER THE LOSS of its Caribbean colonies in 1898, a national malaise struck a Spanish intellectual and governing elite still clinging to, and eager to maintain, Spain’s imperial might in the Americas. The defeat (known to Spanish intellectuals of the time as el desastre) injected a new urgency to the old concern of what distinguished the Spanish national character—an unease further taunted by Spain’s Celt-Iberian, Roman, Visigothic, Arabic, Jewish, and Catholic identities. Much of the intellectual energy of the so-called “generation of ’98” in the aftermath of the defeat turned inward to pursue an answer to the “Spanish Problem,” fed by a desire to explain the nation’s decline, its perceived backwardness and general stagnation (Blinkhorn 13). In 1906, the same year that sees the formalization of Spain’s place in Morocco at the Conference of Algeciras, Miguel de Unamuno, probing the reduction of Spain’s identity to a...

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