Realism and the Fantastic

Nineteenth-century Spanish literature was characterized by decades-long continuities stemming from revolutionary political and aesthetic impulses. The fantastic was central to these continuities. However, in advocating for “Realism”, Galdós and Pardo Bazán successfully rewrote literary history to their own ends, occluding swathes of inventive nineteenth-century literature and ideology, deemed extravagant and lacking serenity. The great deletion included the fantastic, along with a spectrum of literary and political explorations of imaginative freedom to which it belonged. Too often taken as near-literal accounts, Galdós and Pardo Bazán’s essays were polemical interventions in long-standing debates. Their “Realism” primarily aimed for a new balance of serenity and fantasía, a quest shared with literary writers, historians, aspects of “realist” practice, as exemplified in El amigo Manso, may seem perplexing.But, re-situated amid nineteenth-century debates, Spanish “Realism” is an attempt, not to suppress either fantasía or the fantastic but to re-invent them, and so re-imagine Spanish and imperial history and society.