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After the failure of the soixante-huitards, the collapse of European communism, and the fall around 1989 of various dictatorships and revolutions in Latin America, the sentimental approach to history is again reaping successes among the humanities and the social and political sciences. In the Hispanic world, this affective turn is on its way to repeating another fin de si cle like the one led by the intellectuals of 1898. A century later, in both Spanish and Anglo-Saxon universities, notions such as disenchantment, trauma, memory, and empathy inform virtually all the analyses of modern Spanish culture, from the bloody Civil War and the nearly forty years of fascism that followed it to the disappointing transition to democracy. Santiago Morales intervenes in this sentimental approach to history and to the novelistic production of the transition by recovering the links and tensions that the notion of melancholy maintains with the aesthetics of black humor in a corpus of fictional works written between 1976 and 1998. Through a methodology that alternates between the careful analysis of novels by Javier Mar as, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Cristina Fern ndez Cubas, and Juan Jos Mill s, and the distant reading or framing that places these texts in a broader history, Anatom a del desencanto constructs a critique of the equivocal place held in our modern age by feelings that were, in another time, so noble and persistent, such as grief, fear, guilt, and compassion. While other specialists who study the transition today agree in denouncing the ominous persistence of Francoism and the postwar ethos, Santiago Morales sees a deeply ironic formula in the black humor of melancholy: a catalyst in the creative and moral growth of Spanish narrative and a fundamental critical tool to change contemporary sentimental education. Written entirely in Spanish.