1 Derek Flitter, Spanish Romantic Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), pp. 1–22.
2 Georg Luka´cs, The Historical Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983),
Pp. 19–30.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Romantic prose, journalism, and costumbrismo 383
To flee from its present, frequently taking refuge in medieval settings and in the Manichean plots of romance. Such flight, however, is not an entirely escapist gesture. Along with its temporally exotic settings, its fascination with the gothic macabre, and its sustained interest in the supernatural, the historical novel frequently encoded a series of very contemporary nineteenth-century concerns that allowed it to be read as an allegory of the disquieting present in which it developed.
Enrique Gil’s El senor de Bembibre, arguably the most successful of Spain’s historical novels, is a paradigmatic example of such allegoresis. Set in fourteenth-century Leon, in the author’s native province of El Bierzo, the work intertwines a narrative of impossible love with the history of the dissolution of the Order of the Knights of Templar. The representation of medieval Leon, however, is in large measure a stand-in for the Spain of the 1830s and 1840s. The appropriation of the Templar Knights’ properties in the novel resonates eerily with the disentailment of Church properties that the state had begun under Juan Alvarez Mendizabal in 1836.3 Similarly, the Romantic representation of the heroine Beatriz as an angelic, quasi-disembodied soul finds its correlate in the ideologically charged image of the angel del hogar (“angel of the home”) that would increasingly circulate as the prescribed ideal for women in the emergent bourgeois social order.4 More broadly, the novel’s thematic focus on the historical dissolution of all things - the Templars, the protagonists’ love, the Middle Ages - speaks to the contemporary anxiety of a society that was itself in the midst of tumultuous historical change.
An equally contemporary facet of the historical novel was the nationalism that accompanied the genre’s focus on geographical and cultural specificity. In accordance with Spain’s longstanding Castile-centered geopolitics, such nationalism frequently found expression in novels whose basic tropes equated Castilian and Spanish history. Yet Romantic nationalism also authorized and reinvigorated the sense of cultural difference that had historically shaped the regional identities of Iberia. It thus informed many of the foundational writings of the modern regionalist movements, especially in Euskadi (Pablo Pedro de Astarloa, Juan Bautista de Erro y Aspiroa) and in the Catalan Kenaixenga (Ramon Lopez de Soler, Pablo Piferrer, Manuel Mila i Fontanals). Indeed, the legacy of Romantic nationalism would extend well into the twentieth century as the so-called “Generation of 1898” continued to engage Romantic historicism’s quest for the imagined origins of the nation.5
3 Jean-Louis Picoche, Vnromantico espanol: Enrique Gily Carrasco (1815-1845) (Madrid:
Gredos, 1978), pp. 113-115.
4 Bridget Aldaraca, El angel del hogar: Galdos and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 33–54.
5 E. Inman Fox, “Spain as Castile: Nationalism and National Identity.” In Modern Spanish
Culture. Ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 21-36.
384 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century
The literary discourse of the historical novel has often been described as a paradoxical hybrid. While its lyrical dimensions resonate with Romanticism’s expressive poetics, its reliance on painstaking archival research, its archeological verisimilitude, and its highly detailed natural descriptions reflect more empirical concerns. In this regard it is not difficult to see in the Romantic historical novel the foundations both of modern poetic prose and of a Realist mimesis that would later inform the representation of contemporary society in the novels of Restoration authors such as Galdos, Alas, or Pardo Bazan. By the 1840s, the novel had already become an important vehicle for direct political and social commentary as interest shifted from the remote past to contemporary history in works such as El poeta y el banquero; escenas contempordneas de la revolution espanola (“The Poet and the Banker; Contemporary Scenes from the Spanish Revolution,” 1841-1842) by Pedro Mata (dates unknown), Madridy nuestro siglo (“Madrid and Our Century,” 1845-1846) by Ramon de Navarrete (1822-1889), Doce espanoles de brocha gorda. Novela de costumbres contempordneas (“Twelve Spaniards Painted with a Broad Brush. A Novel of Contemporary Customs,” 1846) by Antonio Flores (1818-1865), and La republica roja o los obreros de Paris. Novela politico-social contem-pordnea (“The Red Republic or The Workers of Paris. A Contemporary Socio-Political Novel,” 1849) by Jose Pastor de Rocas (1824-1875).
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