Emilia Pardo Bazán, the most prolific and influential Spanish female writer of the nineteenth century, was a very controversial figure, vilified for her embracement of naturalism and her robust feminist stance. When Insolación was published in 1889 it provoked a litany of negative comments and personal insults. This subtle, psychological novel, drawing on many aspects of its author's personal life, deals with the relationship between Asís, a respectable Galician widow, and Pacheco, a feckless womaniser from Andalucía. Although they scarcely know each other, Asís accepts Pacheco's invitation to visit the San Isidro Fair, where a heady cocktail of sun, alcohol and revelry causes her to behave in an uncharacteristic manner. Insolación explores the conflict between Asís's self-recrimination and concern for the 'qué dirán' and her nascent sexuality. Finally, despite her determination to banish Pacheco from her mind and her intention to go back to Galicia, the couple sleep together and decide to marry. The perceived promiscuity of this work of fiction scandalised the reading public as well as many leading critics. Pereda considered Asís's behaviour reprehensible and Clarín dismissed the novel as a pseudo-erotic boutade. Nowadays, Insolación is recognised as an important novel.

Emilia Pardo Bazán publica "Insolación" cuando ya había sido reconocida como gran novelista tras el éxito de las narraciones de "Los Pazos de Ulloa" y "La Madre Naturaleza". Sus conocimientos sobre la novela europea la llevan entonces a la tribuna del Ateneo y comienza a enviar crónicas de su viaje a Italia a "El Imparcial". "Insolación" es, según su autora, un "estudio episódico". La inexorable premisa naturalista está ausente en esta novela, la presencia del mundo exterior es mas relevante y está subordinada al mundo íntimo de las criaturas literarias. Esto se plasmará en el empleo de una inusitada y más compleja técnica narrativa, de la que el episodio de la Marquesa de Andrade será el inicio de una fase de narración más espiritualista en el sostenido realismo de Emilia Pardo Bazán.

The Spanish literature discussed in this volume falls into two main categories: the work of Galician novelist, short-story writer and critic, Emilia Pardo Bazan and the wider context of prose fiction and criticism during the period 1870 to 1935.

In the long nineteenth century, dominant stereotypes presented people of the Mediterranean South as particularly passionate and unruly, therefore incapable of adapting to the moral and political duties imposed by European civilization and modernity. This book studies, for the first time in comparative perspective, the gender dimension of a process that legitimised internal hierarchies between North and South in the continent. It also analyses how this phenomenon was responded to from Spain and Italy, pointing to the similarities and differences between both countries. Drawing on travel narratives, satires, philosophical works, novels, plays, operas, and paintings, it shows how this transnational process affected, in changing historical contexts, the ways in which nation, gender, and modernity were imagined and mutually articulated.

Imagined Truths provides a twenty-first-century analysis of stylistic and philosophical manifestations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literary realism. Bringing together the work of the foremost specialists in the field of contemporary Spanish letters, this collection offers new approaches to literary and cultural criticism and reveals how Spanish realism, far from imitative of other European movements, engaged in complex and modern concepts of representation and mimesis. Imagined Truths acknowledges the critical importance of women writers and contemporary approaches to questions of gender. The essays address the impact of economics on our perceptions of reality and our constructions of everyday life, and they argue for the importance of emotions in the social construction of individual identity. Most importantly, the essays acknowledge the post-imperial turn in literary studies. Addressing a broad range of authors, works, and topics, including the continued relevance of Cervantes’s Don Quijote and the way Spanish realism moved beyond narrative to inhabit the spaces of both theatre and film, Imagined Truths comprises a series of meditations on new ways of understanding the unique place of realism in Spanish cultural history. Offering insights for specialists in a wide range of disciplines – literature, cultural studies, gender studies, history, philosophy – this collection is equally important for readers just becoming acquainted with realist narrative as a central component of Spanish literary history.

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.