Realism as Resistance

This book explores the fluid boundaries between realism and romanticism, while considering this oscillation between discourses as the legacy of the Quijote to the nineteenth-century Spanish novel. Furthermore, there are studies of characters who act as authors in Benito Perez Galdós's first series of Episodios nacionales, Pio Baroja's La lucha por la vida, and Leopoldo Alas Clarin's La Regenta. For many realists, romanticism has negative associations: quixoticism, exaggeration, impracticality, and femininity or effeminacy.