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(2014) Gender and modernity in Spanish literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Leopoldo Alas and Emilia Pardo Bazán publish Su único hijo and La quimera in the period between 1890 and 1910, which José-Carlos Manier has identified as the time of a "new public in Spain" (203). Manier cites three radical changes that occur during these years. He cites the rising significance of the urban experience as a location for anonymity and a growing market for art. He also identifies the growing consciousness of the middle class in the form of antidespotism, anticlericalism, and antimilitarism against the evergrowing State. Last, he notes the incorporation of the lower middle class and the proletariat into the reading public (204–5). Su único hijo (His Only Son) and La quimera ( The Chimera) portray characters within an urban environment in which art is a commodity and there is a keen sense of class consciousness. In this atmosphere of modern urbanity and awareness, the protagonists of both novels exemplify a chronic state of dreaming that relates to disillusion. Dreams become the main vehicle through which the characters demonstrate the contemplative reaction of the decadent mind-set1 that precludes creative action. Despite the more obvious association of dreams with illusions, the dream state in Su único hijo and La quimera actually feeds these decadent characters' ultimate state of disillusion and solipsistic inertia.2
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Full citation:
Smith Rousselle, E. (2014). Solipsistic inertia, in Gender and modernity in Spanish literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 103-117.
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