This panel explores the intersections of literature, sociability, and the history of emotions in the Hispanic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling” and Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities,” as well as more recent work in affect theory (Ahmed 2004), we consider emotions not as private, psychological states but as cultural and social practices. Recent scholarship has also stressed the dual nature of emotion concepts—oscillating between natural and normative kinds (Scarantino 2025)—and their role in shaping both political discourses and collective identities.

In the Hispanic context, the long eighteenth century and the post-Enlightenment nineteenth century witnessed the consolidation of new emotional repertoires that defined literary production, sociability, and political cultures (Delgado, Fernández, and Labanyi 2016). From the salons and tertulias of the Enlightenment to the patriotic and sentimental rhetoric of nineteenth-century nation building, emotions served as frameworks for sociability, modes of persuasion, and tools for community formation. How were emotional norms formulated, negotiated, or contested across literary and social spaces? In what ways did emotions function as cultural technologies for producing subjects, publics, or counter-publics? How did literary texts articulate, transmit, or reshape collective affects across class, gender, racial, or geopolitical lines? What emotional regimes structured forms of sociability in both metropolitan and colonial contexts, and how were these regimes received, resisted, or reimagined?

We invite papers that examine how literature and cultural practices engaged, circulated, and transformed emotional repertoires during this period. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Literary representations of sociability, affect, and community.
• Emotional economies in salons, tertulias, and print culture.
• Patriotism, sentimentality, and collective emotions in political discourse.
• Transatlantic and transnational emotional exchanges between Spain, Latin America, and other cultural spheres.
• The role of literary genres (poetry, theater, prose, periodical press…) and subgenres (horror, romance, historical fiction…) in shaping emotional frameworks.
• The relationship between emotions, gender, and social norms.
• The interplay of reason and sensibility in Enlightenment, Romantic, Realistic, and Naturalistic contexts.

By focusing on the Hispanic world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this session seeks to connect literary studies with broader debates in affect theory, the history of emotions, and cultural history. Comparative and interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome.

Please submit a 200-250-word abstract and a brief biography to the organizers Ana Fernández-Blázquez (ana.fernandez-blazquez@yale.edu) and Alberto C. Romero Vallejo (alberto.romero.vallejo@gmail.com) by Sunday, March 1st, 2026. Panelists will be notified of acceptance by March 15th and must be members of MLA in order to presen