Abstract
Focussing on Cirilo Villaverde’s canonical novel Cecilia Valdés (1882), this article explores the neglected spectral dimension of its realism. I argue that, while explicitly denying the existence of ghosts, Villaverde engages with their false but real appearance as the only way to accurately represent a world marked by the invisibilization of certain lives. I call this dimension of his writing spectral realism: a mode of representing socially produced absences that is deeply dependent on the ‘world of illusions’ that the realist writer claims to have left behind and, in particular, on the interweaving of Gothic tropes and Catholic imagery.
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