Between 1876 and 1877, the journal Revista Compostelana published La ciencia amena, a series of eleven popular science articles by Emilia Pardo Bazán. Drawing on the works of Angelo Secchi, Pardo Bazán popularized concepts of physics relating to heat, light, electricity, and mechanical energy. Within this context, her controversy with the scientist Octavio Lois shaped both the construction of her popularizing discourse and its aims of knowledge transmission: Angelo Secchi emerged as a form of transcultural polyptoton, mobilized in the service of opposing intellectual positions.

Pardo Bazán's engagement with Secchi's work took multiple forms of expression—from the preface to Pascual López to Insolación—as well as different modes of dissemination, from periodical articles to books, and diverse modes of appropriation, ranging from the Reflexiones científicas contra el darwinismo to her Zola-inspired admiration. In this paper, I reconstruct the extensive interdiscourse surrounding the popularization of the renowned Italian astronomer's work in Pardo Bazán's writings.

More broadly, Pardo Bazán's case highlights the rhetorical, epistemic, and social functions of controversy through the lens of gender, which operates as an indispensable hermeneutic framework for refining the literary history of scientific popularization.