Any study of nineteenth century literary history must take into account the political and social backgrounds of romanticism and realism. But Professor Iris Zavala has done more than that in her book on the ideologies and political ideas expressed in the nineteenth century Spanish novel. By her firm grasp of the inter-relationship of history and literature, she has made a major contribution to social history.
This book is rich in detail assembled from contemporary pamphlets, newspapers, and popular literature. Like her other recent study, Masones, comuneros, y carbonarios (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1971), fully half of this volume is devoted to reproduction of source materials. But the first halves of both books are more than introductions to annotated documents. Both are theoretical and historical essays which provide important revisions of nineteenth century intellectual and social history.
The thesis she has been developing in both works is that the French and English utopian socialists and utilitarians, through their Spanish followers, made a major contribution to the dissemination of republican political ideas in Spain. She argues that the proliferation of popular literature after 1840 awakened the Spanish bourgeoisie to the misery of their peasants and workers, especially women, whom the literature treated as victims of society. Of course this awareness did not make sympathizers into social revolutionaries, but it did persuade them of the necessity for political and social reform and of the need for class cooperation. The effect was to some degree a political one, since some bourgeois readers were converted to liberal monarchism and even to democratic republicanism. The literary ramifications of this humanitarianism was the introduction of new subjects for the novel.
Like other literary histories, this book is important simply because it does the necessary, though often difficult, task of tracing influences. So we hear of Walter Scott, Chateaubriand, Eugene Sue, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and their Spanish followers, Fernán Caballero, Ayguals de Izco, and Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, among others. Although Professor Zavala is interested in romanticism and realism, she is more particularly concerned with the social importance of these literary movements as they developed in nineteenth century Spain.
Her book is comprehensive. It deals with the counter-revolutionary, sentimental, religious, and moralistic side of romanticism, with the aesthetic criticisms of naturalism, and with the politically conservative aspects of both literary movements. But Professor Zavala is clearly more interested in the particularly progressive literary figures such as the mediocre propagandist, Ayguals de Izco, the Spanish follower of Eugene Sue; in Sixto Cámara, a founder of the radical Democratic Party, and a revolutionary playwright who made bandits into popular heroes; in the Catalan republican leader Ceferino Tressera, who wrote about crime, prostitution, and madness; and in Fernández y González, who took bandits and gypsies for his subjects. She does not ignore the greatest nineteenth century novelists such as Pérez Galdos or Emilia Pardo Bazán, but clearly she feels that most of their work was less politically influential than that of some of their less talented but more widely read colleagues.
Because she is interested in popular novels, however limited their literary merits, her book may be more useful to social and intellectual historians than to any other group. While she has a tremendous grasp of the aesthetic arguments that were afoot, especially in reaction to realism and naturalism, she is concerned with the political sociology of such debates. Having scoured the popular literature of the nineteenth century, she provides useful information for the social historian on the conditions of the poor and of women, on the organization of prostitution, on attitudes toward the treatment of the insane, on banditry, and on other topics about the working class and peasants with which a new breed of historians is increasingly concerned.
