This volume contains thirty-four original research-articles, dealing with varied themes, authors, periods and preoccupations in Hispanic literature, society and culture: More's Utopia and an early Spanish translation, Lope de Vega and Shakespeare, Calderon, Cervantes, Cafes in fortunata y Jacinta, Unamuno, Machado, Baroja and the modernist aesthetic, realism in the post war novel, death and resurrection in Lorca, play into film, Juan Ramon Jimenez, language and cultural identity, reading Valente, Salvador Espriu and Narcis Oller, Eca de Queiroz, Jose Regio and Peruvian poet-novelists.

This volume contains thirty-four original research-articles, dealing with varied themes, authors, periods and preoccupations in Hispanic literature, society and culture: More's Utopia and an early Spanish translation, Lope de Vega and Shakespeare, Calderon, Cervantes, Cafes in fortunata y Jacinta, Unamuno, Machado, Baroja and the modernist aesthetic, realism in the post war novel, death and resurrection in Lorca, play into film, Juan Ramon Jimenez, language and cultural identity, reading Valente, Salvador Espriu and Narcis Oller, Eca de Queiroz, Jose Regio and Peruvian poet-novelists.

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.

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.