This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reveals the significance of discourses of saintliness in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spanish culture by focusing on a group of novels which explore sainthood through fictional characters. It aims to challenge such a division, by showing that it obscures how much these texts have in common, particularly in terms of their approach to sainthood. The book demonstrates that the discourses present in religious texts do not belong to a discrete milieu, separate from the rest of Spanish culture, but that their concerns echo and intersect with the anxieties and undercurrents of the wider culture. It sustains the somewhat shocking argument that notions of sainthood in this period have an analogous structure to that of cursilería, the cultural phenomenon proposed as central to an understanding of modern Spanish literature and culture by Noël Valis.