Toward a More Humane Kind of Progress: Alternative Modernities in Post-Civil War Spanish Exile investigates the uses of Spanish history and culture for the rehabilitation of the constitutive ideals of European modernity in the creative and theoretical work of three major figures of Spanish exile: Ramon Gaya, Francisco Ayala, and Maria Zambrano. In the case of Ramon Gaya, it finds an effort to posit, by way of the figure of the "great artist," the possibility of a perspective at once sprung from its embeddedness in the world and the relativism such a position implies and at the same time grounded in the living, feeling body. In that of Francisco Ayala, it identifies in the elaboration of a relationship between literary text and meaning distinct from than that between sign and referent a mechanism for transforming the interpretative effort to determine the true meaning of the text from one that suppresses difference and multiplicity to one that motivates empathy. Finally, in philosopher Maria Zambrano's signature concept of razon poetica, or poetic reason, it finds a means of locating an emancipatory social politics within a history structured by inclusion, rather than exclusion. In each chapter, and in particular in the introduction and conclusion, the dissertation attends to the value of the perspectives and ideas it studies to the essential work of understanding and assessing responses to ongoing social and political crises in Spain and beyond.