The Peregrino/Outsider in Three Novels by Benito Perez Galdos

Degree awarded: Ph.D. Spanish. The Catholic University of AmericaBefore November 24, 2013, this dissertation can be viewed by CUA users only. [6 months embargo]A theme of some of the great nineteenth-century novelist Perez Galdos's most important novels is the outsider or the misfit, a theme which has not been thoroughly studied yet. My contention is that the outsider, although often a secondary character, is pivotal to the development of the thematics of the novel. The outsider figure is a single male, often older, foreign, and/or marginalized by race or physical disabilities. Nevertheless, he is, in a sense, the mortar that holds together the bricks of the novel, a connecting link among other characters. In the three works that I plan to study, Gloria (1877), Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-1887), and Tormento (1884), novels that reflect well what is often considered the most creative and decisive decade in Galdos's writing, I will show the breadth, range and significance of the theme of the outsider, embodied in Maxi Rubin, Evaristo Feijoo, Daniel Morton, and Augustin Caballero. I will also delineate how the theme of the outsider in Galdos's works is linked intertextually to the much older and time-honored theme of the peregrino de amor in Spanish literature. This topic has not been investigated previously by Galdos scholars. It offers a most enlightening perspective on the novels and themes to be discussed. I will be using a New Thematics approach in my analysis of the outsider in Galdos's works. "Literature is by essence thematic," writes George Steiner. One difference that the critic Sander Gilman notes in the New Thematics is that whereas the older tradition sought "the kernel of truth" behind the image, the new approach uses the image as a means of investigating the ever-shifting layers of reality within a text: to find vital nuances, clarifications, paradoxes, and intertexts within texts. One example of this concept is my connecting the "outsider" theme in Galdos's novels to the peregrino de amor theme from Spanish literary tradition. Among the theorists I will use are Claude Bremond, Menachem Brinker, Thomas Pavel, Werner Sollors, and others.Made available in DSpace on 2013-06-25T14:59:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 OrozcoWatrel_cua_0043A_10420display.pdf: 1460750 bytes, checksum: bf1302679344d33d32f8dd4268a7b77d (MD5