Obra cuyo argumento se crea mediante los desv�os rutinarios y las travesuras mentales del narrador. Es el recuento de una larga y tortuosa serie de sucesos que pasaron al narrador mientras hac�a un mandado un d�a normal en Madrid. Su orginalidad en desarrolar el trama, la cual incorpora much�simos detalles frente a la compleja naturaleza de la acci�n capta al lector hasta el final.

Relato que narra la historia de cierta condesa mezclada con noticias de periódico, conversaciones de viajeros, imágenes del tranvía, etc., hasta componer un divertido disparate.

Ríos-Font re-reads nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish texts and authors that have tested the boundary between high and low, repositioning them within Spanish critical tradition. Through these self-reflexive readings, the book explores how the definition of literature has changed in more than two centuries of modernity in Spain, and the institutional and cultural negotiations behind this change."--Jacket.

This is a short story of a man who gets on a tram to return some books to a friend. He runs into a gossipy friend who starts telling him about what may or may not be a true story. The friend, a doctor, tells him about a stunning countess who has an imprudent admirer and a scheming butler. The narrator hardly listens to the tale until the doctor reveals the butler's mysterious hold over the countess. After his interest is aroused, the man is left hanging when the doctor leaves the tram without finishing the story. The narrator realizes the newspaper he has covered the books in has a feuilleton printed that seems to pick up the doctor's story. He reads it and, despite some variations with the doctor's tale, begins to imagine characters from it entering and exiting the tram. He overhears bits and pieces of stories on his return tram ride and assumes they are part of the countess' tale and several unexpected events follow. What happens later with the man unfolds later in this intriguing and unique story.

The volume Celebrations and Connections in Hispanic Literature is itself a celebration of a tradition of scholarly dialogue in a relaxed, festive atmosphere. The articles included here began as papers presented at the 25th Anniversary Edition of the Biennial Louisiana Conference on Hispanic Languages and Literatures, held in Baton Rouge Louisiana, February 23-24, 2006. Each of the authors responds in innovative ways to the idea of connecting texts, contexts, and genres, as well as to the disconnect that is often present between what we perceive as “Hispanic” identity and the experience of those left on the margin. Topics include “Celebrating and Rewriting Difference: (De)colonized Identities,” “Word and Image in the Spanish Golden Age,” and “Latin American Literature and Politics,” among others. The collection is demonstrative of current trends in Hispanic literary and cultural criticism, which are increasingly less bound by traditional regional and temporal constructs. While each author’s research is rooted in a specific socio-historic context, their combined contributions to the present volume provide a far-reaching perspective that expands the notion of “text” to go beyond the literary and engage a multitude of disciplines. “…it emphasizes the often illuminating connections among literary and cultural texts which can be drawn when one conceives of Hispanism and its literary and cultural fields as shaped by trends and issues, rather than divided by periods and regions (...) What strikes me most is the newness of each piece. While each is very well informed, none rehearses old historical or theoretical ground more than is absolutely necessary, but rather presents either a new or overlooked text or offers a new approach.” Leslie Bary, University of Louisiana, Lafayette “An impressive array of well-established and younger scholars has produced a volume whose scope is the entire Hispanic world extending from the Golden Age to the contemporary era. (...) This volume will be of interest to all scholars and critics of Hispanic literature as well as to historians and political scientists. Many of the essays challenge traditional assumptions about the colonization of the Hispanic world as well as the motivations for the revolutions for independence whose influence is still strongly alive in contemporary treatments of fundamental questions of national identity, race, class, and gender.” C. Chris Soufas, Jr., Tulane University

The wise fool, the sensible madman, and the village idiot, traditional characters in European literature, are best-known through Don Quixote. Galdós, Spain's most important novelist after Cervantes, contributed to this corpus with a number of principal characters whose affinity to Cervantes's hero is clearly recognizable. Bly demonstrates that a number of Galdós's secondary characters - the eccentric old men who appear with regular frequency in the realist social novels of his most important period of writing, 1876 to1897 - can be classified as a variant or sub-group of this type.