New Galdós Studies


Book Description

The master of the realist novel of nineteenth-century Spain, Benito Pérez Galdós, is the subject of these new studies. The master of the realist novel of nineteenth-century Spain, Benito Pérez Galdós, is the subject of New Galdós Studies, offered in memory of John Varey, author of Galdós Studies, the foundational text for contemporary Galdosian scholarship. Eamonn Rodgers describes Galdós's early readership and reception; James Whiston illustrates Galdós's creativity in Lo prohibido; Rhian Davies explores the enrichment of the novelist's language in Torquemada en la Cruz; Teresa Fuentes Peris demonstrates Galdós's radical critique of dominant social assumptions in Fortunata y Jacinta; Alex Longhurst deals with the representation of poverty in Misericordia while Lisa Condé detects a feminist intention in Tristana; Eric Southworth finds rich cultural and spiritual allusion in the same work; Nichols Round relates the deaths of children in the Torquemada novels and Angel Guerra to end-of-century ideological concerns.




The Reframing of Realism


Book Description

In virtually every aspect of human behavior, ritual, language, and art, perceptions are organized through the act of framing. In the writing of Benito Perez Galdós, Spain's most prolific and innovative nineteenth-century novelist, Hazel Gold finds this principle insistently at work. By exploring Galdós's methods of structuring and evaluating literary and historical experience, Gold illuminates the novelist's art and uncovers the far-reaching narratological, social, and epistemological implications of his framing strategies. A close look at Galdós's novels reveals the artist at pains to contain and interpret what he perceived to be the distinctive and often disheartening experience of bourgeois liberalism of his day. At the same time, he can be seen here undermining or negating the accepted conventions of realist fiction. Looking beyond text to context, Gold examines the ways in which Galdós's work itself has been framed by readers and critics in accordance with changing allegiances to contemporary literary theory and the canon. The highly ambiguous status of the frame in Galdós's fictions confirms the author's own signal position as a writer poised at the limits between realism and modernity. Gold's work will command the interest of students of Spanish and comparative literature, narrative theory, and the novel, as well as all those for whom realism and representation are at issue.




Galdós's Segunda Manera


Book Description

This book explores the change that occurred in the writings of Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdos when he entered his segunda manera in 1881 with the publication of La desheredada, his first contemporary novel. Critical work on this important phase of Galdos's career has tended to concentrate on the content of his novels, with little attention given to the way in which Galdos conveys that content to the reader. By studying these works in light of how their stories are told, Linda Willem shows that La desheredada marks the beginning of a more sophisticated and varied mode of narrative in Galdos's novels. Through close readings of his first seven contemporary works, Willem shows how the affective response associated with various narrative devices plays a role in the rhetorical strategies of each text.




The Structure of Realism


Book Description

Volume 184 in the North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures series.




Torquemada


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Galdós Studies II


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La Fontana de Oro


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Blood Novels


Book Description

In the late nineteenth century, Spain’s most prominent writers – Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas, and Benito Pérez Galdós – made blood a crucial feature of their fiction. Blood Novels examines the cultural and literary significance of blood, unsettling the dominant assumption of the period that blood no longer played a decisive role in social hierarchies. By examining fictional works through the rubric of "blood novels," Julia H. Chang identifies a shared fascination with blood that probes the limits of realism through blood’s dual nature of matter and metaphor. Situating the literature within broader cultural and theoretical debates, Blood Novels attends to the aesthetic contours of material blood and in particular how bleeding is inflected by gender, caste, and race. Critically engaging with feminist theory, theories of race and whiteness, literary criticism, and medical literature, this innovative study makes a case for treating blood as a critical analytic tool that not only sheds new light on Spanish realism but, more broadly, challenges our understanding of gendered and racialized embodiment in Spain.




Fortunata and Jacinta


Book Description

Galdoz's four-part Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-7), the masterpiece among his almost 80 novels, tells the turbulent story of two women, their husbands and their lovers, set against the intricate web of dynastic alliances and class contrasts of Madrid in the 1870s. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.




Ambiguous Angels


Book Description

The contradictory nature of the work of Benito Prez Galds, Spain's greatest modern novelist, is brought to the fore in Catherine Jagoe's innovative and rigorous study. Revising commonly held views of his feminism, she explores the relation of Galds's novels to the "woman question" in Spain, arguing that after 1892 the muted feminist discourse of his early work largely disappears. While his later novels have been interpreted as celebrations of the emancipated new woman, Jagoe contends that they actually reinforce the conservative, bourgeois model of frugal, virtuous womanhood--the angel of the house. Using primary sources such as periodicals, medical texts, and conduct literature, Jagoe's examination of the evolution of feminism makes Ambiguous Angels valuable to anyone interested in gender, culture, and narrative in nineteenth-century Europe. The contradictory nature of the work of Benito Prez Galds, Spain's greatest modern novelist, is brought to the fore in Catherine Jagoe's innovative and rigorous study. Revising commonly held views of his feminism, she explores the relation of Galds's novels to the "woman question" in Spain, arguing that after 1892 the muted feminist discourse of his early work largely disappears. While his later novels have been interpreted as celebrations of the emancipated new woman, Jagoe contends that they actually reinforce the conservative, bourgeois model of frugal, virtuous womanhood--the angel of the house. Using primary sources such as periodicals, medical texts, and conduct literature, Jagoe's examination of the evolution of feminism makes Ambiguous Angels valuable to anyone interested in gender, culture, and narrative in nineteenth-century Europe.