Valera in Dialogue/in Dialogue with Valera: A Novelist’s Work in Conversation with That of His Contemporaries and Successors

Juan Valera (1824-1905) was Spain’s only realist with a lifelong insistence that narrative privilege invention over testimony. Throughout Valera’s lengthy career, his novels engaged in a running esthetic debate with those of his chief rivals, Galdos and Alas. This debate, chronicled in the present work, led to many compromises and ultimately produced, in the twentieth-century fiction of Valle-Inclan and Unamuno, a novelistic form, also detailed here, that exhibited clear debts to Valera’s catalytic influence.