Author Description

Quixotic Modernists gives close readings of two novels by two little-studied writers of the early twentieth century in Spain, Felipe Trigo's Les ingénues (1909) and María Marínez Sierra's Tú eres la paz (1906), in relation to the canonical Tristana by Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist. By doing so, the study reveals the modern message (regarding gender), and modernist qualities of the prose of these works. Included are discussions of Quijote intertexts, proverbial language and tactics, the angel and the "muder-niña," flower, water, and animal imagery, and visual arts in relation to gender definition. Also included are contemporary responses to the novels and material about the authors' lives and Spain's social conditions in the early twentieth century. Quixotic Modernists integrates these themes into a study of the novelization of difficulties in transforming contemporary gender and class roles. In all three authors' works, this process of change in roles for both men and women becomes a quixotic enterprise, in which artists as/and characters search to reconnect with an elusive material, social body.