Galdós. Cien años de actualidad ed. by M.a Ángeles Varela Olea

Abstract

Reviewed by: Galdós. Cien años de actualidad ed. by M.a Ángeles Varela Olea Dorota Heneghan M.a ÁNGELES VARELA OLEA (ed.). Galdós. Cien años de actualidad. Bern, Peter Lang, 2021. 296 pp. Galdós. Cien años de actualidad is a collection of fifteen essays written as a tribute to Galdós's work and legacy to commemorate the centenary of his death. As M.ª Ángeles Varela Olea recounts in the introduction, the writer's influence goes beyond the literary and cultural spheres of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain in the sense that his views and approaches to the challenges of the world in which he lived continue to resonate in our realities. Varela Olea organizes her collection in six sections that enrich a growing body of scholarship on Galdós's relevance to the present, his journalistic work, literary techniques, his impact on his fellow writers, theatrical output, stage, and television adaptations of his novels as well as translations of his oeuvre abroad. The first section contains three essays that center on the author's life and writings as a source of continuing inspiration to Galdós's scholars. In the opening chapter, Noël Valis magnificently traces the overarching trajectory of multiple approaches and intertwining themes in contributions to Galdós studies by North American scholars. In this essay, Valis accentuates interdisciplinary research as the key characteristic of recent studies and pinpoints a fresh challenge for future investigations––finding new modes to convey the beauty and complexity of the Galdosian universe to a broader audience. Through close readings of El doctor Centeno and the analysis of the Phoenix myth, Yolanda Arencibia explores in her essay the significance of resilience in Galdós's characters and the author's life. The final chapter delves into Galdós's journalistic coverage of the 1865 pandemic in Spain in the context of the novelist's interest in science and personal views on religion. In it, Varela Olea successfully makes the case that Galdós's rejection of the coupling of politics and religion, so central to many of his literary creations from the 1870s onward, can already be traced to his little-studied articles on the pandemic in La Nación. The second section, comprised of two chapters, continues with a focus on the author's journalistic work. In the first, Pilar García Pinacho and Carmen Menéndez-Onrubia address the topic of charity in Galdós's "La hija mimada." García Pinacho and Menéndez-Onrubia read the short story, written in 1885 for the special edition of El Día to raise funds for earthquake victims, as the author's praise of evangelical charity and his scorn of philanthropy motivated by society's self-interest. In the second, Isabel Román Román studies Galdós's contributions to La Prensa and La Nación and offers a fresh take on the connections between the author's sketches of characters and scenes of everyday urban life in his press articles and fiction. The third section turns readers' attention to Galdós's literary techniques. Building on previous research on the intersection between pictorial and literary art in Galdós's works, Francisco Estévez details the function of ekphrasis in the author's depiction of his characters in his turn-of-the-century narrative. Multiple perspectives, different narrative voices and changes in focalization are only some of the author's techniques that Donatella Siviero studies in her essay on psychological and social violence in Doña Perfecta. The final chapter in this section explores the frequent reappearance of familiar characters in Galdós's narrative. In it, Assunta [End Page 237] Claudia Scotto di Carlo contends that the reintroduction of recurring characters enabled Galdós to create the effect of a multidimensional reality and unity within his works. The fourth section brings into focus Galdós's relation with his fellow writers. In his essay, Antonio Arroyo Almaraz studies the exchange of letters between Galdós and Narcís Oller and provides extensive evidence of similarities in their representation of urban space in Fortunata y Jacinta and La febre d'or...