Includes sección escolar; v. 2-3 having separate pagination.

Benito Pérez Galdós has long been considered the Spanish Tolstoy; however, unlike those of his Russian counterpart, few of his works are available in English--and fewer still are the subjects of serious literary scholarship. This book approaches one of the author's most memorable characters, Madrid moneylender Francisco Torquemada, and considers the extent to which notions of profit, efficiency, and utility inform the Torquemada series--juxtaposing nineteenth-century understandings of waste and profit with contemporary economic ideas in order to better comprehend the writer and his world.

This study provides an examination of the Spanish novelist Perez Galdos' turn to the stage in 1892 and his simultaneous shift in approach towards the roles of women in society. Particular attention is paid to the creation of and compromise involved in Galdos' dramatic debut, Realidad, which marks a significant turning point in both artistic and ideological terms. The study analyzes through the contemporary drama of the first period the subsequent evolution of La Mujer Nueva on stage. All the relevant manuscripts, correspondence, and reviews available in the CasaMuseo and the Biblioteca Nacional have been studied in order to present a comprehensive picture of this phase in Galdos' career.

Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) occupies a position in Spanish literature surpassed only by Cervantes, and, like him, made a major contribution to the European novel that is now becoming widely recognized. In a semiological approach to the second period of Episodios Nacionales, Diane Urey demonstrates the relevance of these twenty-six novels, the least studied of Galdos's works, to fundamental issues such as the relationship between history and fiction, and between mimesis and creation. Her findings of ambiguity, irony, and allegory in this writer's highly self-conscious historical novels will revise our views of Galdos's place in European letters while offering new insights into a general theory of historical fiction. Diane Urey offers an alternative to referential or ideological interpretations of the Episodios by stressing the indeterminate textuality of historical incidents and the fictionality of historical discourse. Drawing on Derrida, De Man, Foucault, and Hayden White, she applies a wide range of narrative theory to these texts and concludes that novel and history are interchangeable modes of discourse because they rely necessarily on the same narrative strategies. Originally published in 1989. 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.

With the advances of Galdos scholarship over the last twenty years, the episodios are increasingly treated as works of fiction rather than as means of transmitting elementary historical facts to the ignorant; furthermore, characters' protestations are no longer always taken at face value. The present volume complements the previous study, Galdos: The Mature Thought, in which the twenty-six episodios written between 1898 and 1912 are examined in their ideological context.

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