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This article studies Gothic motifs and tropes in José Fernández Bremón's «Un crimen científico», Emilia Pardo Bazán's Pascual López: autobiografía de un estudiante de medicina and Pío Baroja's El árbol de la ciencia within the tradition of Mary Shelley's pioneering novel Frankenstein. They are instrumental for conveying the vexed question of the modernisation of Spain through scientific progress, with approaches that range from the nuanced optimism of Fernández Bremón to the downright pessimism of Baroja. This trend is part of the wider movement for a moral, political, and cultural regeneration that characterised Spanish intellectual activity at the time. The tensions between past and present appear in the three narratives in a line of continuity and readjustment of high aesthetic and intellectual relevance.

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The Spanish translation of Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) at the turn of the nineteenth century was one of the most remarkable literary events of the period in Spain. It appeared at a crucial time of shifting cultural paradigms and provoked an intense debate on some literary issues that were key in the transition to a new Romantic aesthetics, by introducing a view of the creative process based on pre-Romantic versions of the concepts of genius, the imagination and the sublime. But in its adaptation to the Spanish context Blair's work underwent a singular nationalization process. It also helped disseminate an Anglo-Hispanic canon that advanced the shift from French cultural dominance to an increasing Anglophilia that became noticeable in many Spanish authors and critics in subsequent decades. Thanks to the official adoption of the Lecciones as a rhetorical and literary handbook in schools and universities in the first half of the nineteenth century, the pre-Romantic canon established through Blair's work may have even contributed to the consolidation of literary eclecticism in Spain.