This new interdisciplinary study argues that the late-nineteenth-century Spanish realist novel not only documents but also forms part of the contemporary nation-formation process. Drawing on a wide range of recent cultural theory from largely English- and French-language sources, it relates their insights to contemporary Spanish debates in the fields of economics, politics, medicine and town planning, showing that the cultural anxieties dominant in other western nations at the time found acute expression in Spain precisely because of the imperfect nature of the modernization process. In particular the book studies the ways in which women function in canonical Spanish realist texts as a cipher for anxieties about modernization, and especially about its conversion of reality into representation. The consequence is an intense self-reflexivity which mirrors contemporary critiques of flawed systems of monetary and political representation, as well as the emphasis by social reformers on self-making.