This study examines the profound impact of Cervantes and Don Quijote on the magnum opus of Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's pre-eminent novelist of the 19th century. It aims to demonstrate how he incorporates and rewrites aspects of the Quijote.

Driven by such diverse advances as the Human Genome Project and the explosion of the World Wide Web, and also by the threat of human-inspired disasters such as global warming, the field of science and literature studies is currently undergoing an unprecedented expansion. The relations between science and literature have been and continue to be central to understanding Hispanic civilization and culture. In spite of this, Science, Literature, and Film in the Spanish-Speaking World is the first and only book to treat this new and dynamic field from an Hispanic perspective. This unique volume opens the door to an entirely new focus in the study of Hispanic literature and culture.

The fraught tension between science and religion has loomed large in scholarship about the nineteenth century in Spain, especially given the prominence of the Catholic Church and the discoveries made by Wallace and Darwin. The struggle for epistemological superiority between these two discourses (science and religion) has served to overshadow certain corners of the cultural landscape that, though prominent sites of intellectual exploration in their day, have received comparatively less scholarly attention until recently. Fringe Discourses brings together a group of essays that seeks to restore a sense of the epistemological richness of nineteenth-century Spain. By exploring the relationship between epistemology, modernity, and subjectivity, these essays recover significant efforts by Spanish authors and intellectuals to explain human nature and their world, which seemed to be changing so radically before their eyes. In doing so the essays also reveal just how elastic the relationship was between science and pseudoscience, genius and quackery. Offering a veritable Wunderkammer, the authors collected here train their sights both on curious fields of study (from pogonolgy, the science of beards, to Spiritualism) and curiouser people (from a government spy on undercover assignment in Morocco dressed as a Moorish prince to a hypnotic huckster who dupes the queen regent). With other authors focusing on science fiction dystopias, mystical journeys, and anatomical symbology, Fringe Discourses reveals the Spanish nineteenth century for the intellectual Wild West it was.

Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) was one of Spain's outstanding novelists and the author of two vast cycles of novels and a number of plays. In this critical study of Galdos in English, Stephen Gilman relates the writer and his work to the nineteenth century novel as a genre and traces his artistic growth during a twenty-year period, from his initial historical fable, La Fontana de Oro, to his masterpiece, Fortunata y Jacinta. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A History of the Spanish Novel is the only volume in English that offers comprehensive coverage of the history of the Spanish novel, from the sixteenth century to the present day, with chapters written by some of the world-leading experts in the field.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

Others with an interest in literary theory, Renaissance studies, and the development of the novel.

Miguel de Cervantes’s experimentation with theatricality is frequently tied to the notion of revelation and disclosure of hidden truths. Drawing the Curtain showcases the elements of theatricality that characterize Cervantes’s prose and analyses the ways in which he uses theatricality in his own literary production. Bringing together the works of well-known scholars, who draw from a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches, this collection demonstrates how Cervantes exploits revelation and disclosure to create dynamic dramatic moments that surprise and engage observers and readers. Hewing closely to Peter Brook’s notion of the bare or empty stage, Esther Fernández and Adrienne L. Martín argue that Cervantes’s omnipresent concern with theatricality manifests not only in his drama but also in the myriad metatheatrical instances dispersed throughout his prose works. In doing so, Drawing the Curtain sheds light on the ways in which Cervantes forces his readers to engage with themes that are central to his life and works, including love, freedom, truth, confinement, and otherness.

Between 1881 and 1897, Benito P rez Gald s, generally acknowledged as Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist, composed some twenty "contemporary" novels, which Geoffrey Ribbans characterizes as the peak of his achievement. This monumental study traces the evolution of the many strands that make up one of them: the long and complex novel Fortunata y Jacinta. Ribbans examines the various stages of composition, not only the earlier, reconstructed Alpha version but also subsequent revisions in the much corrected handwritten text and in the printer's galleys. He treats these tentative drafts as part of the process of reaching out toward the coherent definitive text. Ribbans's analysis of such devices as the ambiguous role of the narrator, the use of free indirect style and direct dialogue, and the construction of distinctive ideolects leads to the heart of his study, the development of Gald s's characters.