The student’s record of the nineteenth-century writer Juan Valera, has been preserved in the files of the University of Granada where the el novelist, indigenous to Cordoba, read Law. Remedios Sánchez García, who has found the record during the development of her rsearch thesis about the role of women in the work of the author of “Juanita la Larga”, “Morsamor” or “Genio y figura”, which will be entirely published for the first time in this work, more than 160 years after it was issued, certifies it. But this is not the only finding of the author of “The role of women in liberal intellectualism of the 19th century. Women in the written novel of Juan Valera”. The discovering of an unpublished biographic-critic study carried out by the Cantabrian researcher of Estanislao Quiroga and de Abarca in 1935, approximately, is another novelty of this analysis.
According to the author of the study, the ignorance and the lack of bibliography about the complete work of Valera are “more than enough” reasons to carry out a research work that “studies in depth his creation and gives this writer, contemporary with Benito Pérez Galdós and Leopoldo Alas Clarín, the role he deserves in Spanish literature”. Sánchez García has carried out for the first time a systematic study of all Valera´s works –about 14 novels– in which he analyses the role of women, who become the main figures of all his works. In this sense, the researcher explains that the writer from Cordoba portrays the female figure in a completely different way to that of his contemporaries Clarín and Galdós, who describe a more urban and submissive woman. On the contrary, the writer of Cordoba portrays a rural but cultured woman, brave and even with power over men, especially from the emotional viewpoint.
A reflection of the nineteenth-century reality
Another outstanding characteristic of the study “The role of women in liberal intellectualism of the 19th century. Women in the written novel of Don Juan Valera” is the historical value of his work as “the vast majority of his characters and stories are inspired by real and even autobiographical references”. In fact, a great part of his novels reflect the knowledge he acquired during his diplomatic tour in countries such as Russia, Italy, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro or Dresden and also reveal “his liberal and tolerant attitude, his knowledge, his lively and ready spirit, in addition to his refined literary style. Individual freedom was an unavoidable premise for him, a problem that emerges in many occasions in the background of his works and is the foundation of his fictions, always founded on reality, although idealized in a very particular way”.
The researcher, who obtained the International Juan Valera Prize in 2001 for other studies about the Cordovan author, has published papers in two of the most prestigious journals in the field of philology, “Bulletin Hispanique” and “Bulletin of Hispanic Studies”, and says that the objective of her work is “to publish a book in the future and carry out a detailed and individual analysis both about the academic record found in the archive of the University of Granada, and about the unpublished research work by Estanislao Quiroga y de Abarca”.
Reference
Remedios Sánchez García
Department of Spanish Literature
Mobile 619 80 17 14
E-mail. reme_sanchez@hotmail.com
Professor Amelina Correa Ramón
Department of Spanish Literature
Tel. 958 243 599 / 958 246 394 (Department) E-mail. amelina@ugr.es
