Realism as Resistance: Romanticism and Authorship in Galdos, Clarin, and Baroja

This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Perez Galdós’s first series of Episodios nacionales, Pio Baroja’s La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas Clarin’s La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixoticism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy. The book’s conclusion suggests that the external authors, who wrote these novels about quixotic author-characters’ lingering romanticism, imagine themselves as Cervantes figures: they draw on the power of romanticism within their texts, but protect themselves from romanticism’s ‘dangerous’ links to the feminine and irrationality by recalling their male mentor. This study, then, situates itself in the critical tradition that has articulated the porosity of the terms romanticism and realism - the indissoluble marriage of the Hispanic nineteenth century.