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Juan Valera y Alcala-Galiano (1824-1905), one of 19th-century Spain's most well known authors, had a career in the diplomatic service with postings in Europe and the Americas. A serious student of his own and foreign literatures, Valera wrote novels, short stories, essays and literary criticism. Fluent in a number of languages, he also translated Longus's Daphne and Chloe from Greek into Spanish. The unifying thread of his creative work is "art for art's sake," that is, beauty as the end and purpose of imaginative literature, an ideal epitomised by Pepita Jimenez, long considered one of the best half dozen novels of 19th-century Spain. When it was first published in 1874, Pepita Jimenez beca...
Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano (1824-1905), one of 19th-century Spain's most well known authors, had a career in the diplomatic service with postings in Europe and the Americas. A serious student of his own and foreign literatures, Valera wrote novels, short stories, essays and literary criticism.
Juan Valera's 'Pepita Jimenez' is a captivating and thought-provoking novel that delves into the complexities of love, religion, and morality in 19th century Spain. The story follows the protagonist, a young seminarian named Luis, as he navigates his feelings for the charming Pepita Jimenez, the widow of his deceased father. Through eloquent prose and a richly detailed narrative, Valera paints a vivid picture of the societal constraints and internal conflicts that Luis grapples with as he seeks to reconcile his faith with his passionate attraction to Pepita. The novel's exploration of spiritual and romantic themes is beautifully woven into the fabric of the plot, creating a compelling and nu...
Content with her tertuha, or gathering of close friends, her devotions, her books, and her daily routine, Dona Luz is unmoved by the prospect of marriage, because of her illegitimacy and her extremely modest financial status." "But then two men enter her life: Father Enrique, the ailing missionary nephew of Don Acisclo who returns from the Philippines to rest, and Don Jaime Pimentel, the dashing young military man whom Don Acisclo has chosen to back as the district representative in an uncoming election. How Dona Luz responds to both men determines the direction her life will take and the manner in which her illegitimacy will be explained."--Jacket.
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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, Galdós and Alas. This debate, chronicled in the present work, led to many compromises and ultimately produced, in the twentieth-century fiction of Valle-Inclán and Unamuno, a novelistic form, also detailed here, that exhibited clear debts to Valera's catalytic influence.
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In The Representation of Women in the Novels of Juan Valera: A Feminist Critique, Teresia Taylor's text-oriented essay analyzes the role of major female characters in Valera's eight full-length novels. Giving equal attention to the less commonly studied novels, these are organized in four pairs based on similar representations of women (for example, Pepita Jimenez and Dona Luz compare two women who love "priests").