ABSTRACT
Poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, political commentator and existentialist philosopher, as well as devoted educationalist throughout his professional life, Unamuno’s polymathic output poses a real problem to would-be interpreters, that of deciding where to begin to tackle a writer of such bewildering versatility. In terms of his production of imaginative literature, critical preferences have been clear. Unamuno’s substantial poetic production looks staid in comparison with the exciting developments that were going on at the hands of younger poets, the so-called Generation of 1927; which is not to say that Unamuno’s poetry is not deserving of far more attention than it has to date received. Unamuno’s plays, it has often been pointed out, are too abstract to captivate any but the most intellectually driven of theatre audiences. Unamuno’s fiction, on the other hand, has attracted both a wide readership and a devoted and persistent scholarly following in the last fifty years. 1 Niebla (1914) still sells profitably one hundred years after its first appearance and has become the second or third most studied novel in Spanish literature (after Don Quixote and possibly Lazarillo de Tormes). It has also exerted an incalculable impact on modern Spanish fiction, from the vanguard novel of the 1920s right down to our own time, as witnessed by Carlos Cañeque’s Nadal-winning Quién (1997) or Jon Juaristi’s La caza salvaje (2007), winner of the Premio Azorín, to mention but two among many possible titles. Where Unamuno failed as a dramatist he clearly succeeded as a novelist. This book is not, however, concerned with explaining this discrepancy, but rather with explaining his cultivation of the novel genre from the point of view of the ideas he brought to bear on his practice.
