Vision and the Visual Arts in Galdos : A Study of the Novels and Newspaper Articles

Throughout his life the major Spanish novelist Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920) took a keen interest in the visual arts. Parts I and II of this book discuss Galdos's art journalism and his artistic contributions to the illustrated edition of the historical novels. But the main focus (part III) is on references to the visual arts and pictorial landscapes, particularly in the serie contemporanea, the contemporary social novels. Such allusions often act as a guide to interpretation; they also relate to the whole philosophical question of how the eye perceives physical reality. Professor Bly offers a fascinating analysis of the various types of interrelationship between visual art and novelistic action; his study contributes greatly to the understanding of aesthetic and moral perception in Galdos's novels, and contains wider implications for nineteenth-century literary and aesthetic theory.