Regional Fiction and Regeneration: Ricardo Macías Picavea's La Tierra de Campos

Abstract

Ricardo Macías Picavea is mainly remembered for his 1899 monograph El problema nacional, in which he examines the course and causes of Spain's political and economicdecline, and suggests the measures needed for the political, educational, industrial, and agricultural regeneration of his country. Indeed, in his only full-length novel, the two-volume La Tierra de Campos (1897–98), Macías Picavea develops the theme of the need for agricultural reform. Yet in the lengthy foreword to this novel he presents the work as simply a Castilian response to regionalnovels set in other parts of Spain (for example, Andalusia, Cantabria and Galicia) and which flourished in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This article first focuses on how the regional novel was perceived by three leading Spanish writers and then considers the extent to which La Tierra de Campos can be regarded as a regional work. There follows an examination of the unexpectedly pessimistic way in which, through the depiction of attempts at agricultural reform, Macías Picavea develops the regeneration theme in his novel.