The Self Under Siege: Galdós and the Search for Certainty (original) (raw)

The Narrative Premise of Galdos\u27s Lo Prohibido

1991

In their critical study of Lo prohibido most scholars make only casual mention of its memoir format, and the fictitious circumstances of its composition are all but ignored. yet this narrative premise has an overall impact on the novel. In addition to determining the discourse order of the text, it is instrumental in establishing the narrator\u27s authorial autonomy as well as permitting him varying degrees of unreliability. Furthermore, it affects the different narrative voice techniques employed in the novel. The following discussion will examine the implications of this neglected facet of Lo prohibido

Images of the Sign: Semiotic Consciousness in the Novels of Benito Perez Galdos

MLN, 1992

This book began as a doctoral dissertation at Cornell University. I am deeply grateful to John W. Kronik, who not only first introduced me to the works of Galdos, but also enthusiastically guided this project from beginning to end. The final product owes much to his exigence and meticulousness as a reader. I would also like to thank Mary Gaylord and Kathleen Vernon, the other members of my dissertation committee, for their careful reading of the manuscript at various stages of its elaboration. They offered many valuable suggestions from different perspectives. My colleague Maria Cooks generously agreed to proofread my English translations, and Rick Boland, of the University of Missouri Press, did a wonderful job in copyediting the manuscript. My greatest debt, finally, is to my husband Jonathan Mayhew, who was always willing to engage in Galdosian dialogue with me and who unfailingly provided me with the encouragement and moral support necessary to complete this project. Portions of this book have been published previously as the following articles: "Maxi and the Signs of Madness: Reading as Creation in For

Review of Imagined Truths: Realism in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture ed. by Mary L. Coffey, Margot Versteeg

Anales Galdosianos, 2021

Modern Spanish Literary and Cultural Studies have seen a recent turn from traditional appreciations of Spain as a stunted nation suffering from a belated and incomplete modernization and its cultural productions as imitative derivations of British and French models. Instead, recent scholarship shifts the focus of analysis away from notions of lacking and inadequacy to yield more productive readings of Spanish cultural production as a valuable example of the distinctive manifestations of modernity beyond Hegel's "heart of Europe". Mary L. Coffey and Margot Versteeg's co-edited volume, Imagined Truths: Realism in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture, utilizes this approach as a fresh take on Spanish realism, the most accomplished authors and works of which have been long omitted from mainstream examinations of modern Western Literature. As a number of contributions in this volume demonstrate, however, a more nuanced analysis of Spain's literary and cultural production reveals a mastery of the complexities of realism and a unique engagement with modernity that not only parallel those of its Northern European counterparts, but in some cases also anticipate cultural, aesthetic, and scientific developments taking place in the late nineteenth century and beyond. The aims of this collection align with the scholarship of editors Coffey and Versteeg, whose work consistently calls into question the marginalization of both Spain within European Literary and Cultural Studies as well as of those works and genres often neglected within Hispanic Studies themselves. Versteeg's books, for example, reclaim the value of those cultural productions often considered of lesser scholarly value despite their ideological and cultural impact, including illustrated periodicals (Jornaleros de la pluma), género chico plays (De fusiladeros y morcilleros), and Emilia Pardo Bazán's foray into theater (Propuestas para reconstruir una nación). Coffey likewise has demonstrated the role of costumbrismo in the construction of (post-) imperial and (proto-) national identity within a transatlantic framework, and her recent book, The Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present: Spanish Imperialism in the Fiction of Benito Pérez Galdós, emphasizes how Spain's position on the brink of postcolonial nation affords its fin-de-siècle literature a unique, rather than imitative, position in relation to those of England and France. Fittingly, Imagined Truths engages literary forms, texts, and time periods outside the bounds of realism in its strictest aesthetic and historical definition-including British quixotic fiction in translation (Jaffe), intimate epistolary correspondence (Patiño Eirín), twentieth-century theatrical adaptation (Gies), and postwar detective fiction (Sieburth), among others-as a means of considering the movement's antecedents and legacies as well as its networks of influence in Spain and abroad. Particularly notable in this respect is the volume's engagement with costumbrismo, the scholarly appreciation of which was once limited to its documentation of the idiosyncrasies of Spanish culture in the nineteenth century. A number of chapters in Imagined Truths demonstrate the genre's anticipation of realist strategies or, in the case of Joyce Tolliver's "Colonialism, Collages, and Thick Description: Pardo Bazán and the Rhetoric of Detail", the realist incorporation of costumbrista elements imbued with layers of historical and cultural meaning associated with the metropolitan experience of empire and its end. Especially pathbreaking among these new

"The Prophetic Voice In Garro, Morante, and Allende"

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