His professional critic reviews of other author's writings reveal his ideas about the novel. His writings containing a background of a certain intellectual radicalism of a Jacobin style, he admires French writers like Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, and Galdós among the Spanish ones. His pseudonym, "Clarín" (the clear one), implies the features of his work,  critical and enlightening. One of the volumes in which he collected his works of social criticism. is ambiguously titled Solos de Clarín. This is a lonely, independent, and aggressive piece of literary criticism. To develop his writings he starts from a careful knowledge of the people he examines. Then from a solid culture and personal assumptions, he implacably criticizes everything that does not satisfy his demand for authentic values.

He does not have a particular fixed doctrine about how a novel should be constructed. Sometimes he is in favor of an "art for art's sake", away from morality and politics. In others, he defends a committed novel, in a progressive critical line. Both aspects will alternate in their fictional creation. It is in his most outstanding novel, La regenta (1884-85), where he creates a total novel, in which a great variety of human questions are contemplated in the panoramic view of an entire city. In it, the author performs a meticulous and accurate psychological penetration, through an absolute dissection of the characters. He is relentless with his critical vision and a tremendous force that is only sometimes balanced by feelings of compassion for what is observed, representing perhaps the best of the influence of the European spirit in Spain.

Formally his descriptions of places and spaces are not a pure framework of action, but essential conditioning of it. In this way, the atmosphere in which the characters develop largely conditions their actions. The narrator's point of view in his novels contains a relentless critical force. The frequent reference to putrid environments brings this author closer to naturalistic postulates, without however showing such absolute determinism about the destiny of the characters in his novels. On the other hand, his art as a storyteller reaches heights of perfection due to the almost absence of personal reflections, which gives his stories a strong sense of objectivity. His language is almost always precise and appropriate, with a poignant irony in his detailed descriptions that he combines with the reproduction of lively dialogue.

La Regenta (1884-1885)

Doña Berta

Cuentos morales

Pipá 

Su único hijo 

Solos de Clarín 

Cuesta abajo 

El abrazo de Pelayo 

La regenta is a story about the life of a beautiful woman named Ana Ozores, who together with her husband Victor lives in the bland city of Vetusta. Their loveless marriage arose merely out of social conventions. Victor is older than her and likes hunting. Ana, tired of monotony, takes an interest in religion to find meaning in life.

Fiction

In 1927, a series of young writers gathered at the Seville Athenaeum to commemorate the third centenary of Góngora's death. There are writers like García Lorca, Dámaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, Alberti, Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, and Luis Cernuda, among the most representative of what would later become the Generation of '27. Of approximate age and similar academic training, they constitute a compact group and all its members were aware of belonging to the group of this literary generation.

 The Generation of ‘27 has been characterized since its origin by the search for a new poetic language, even when each member develops their personal style. These poets' desire for renewal is combined with fair respect for the literature of the past. They admired Unamuno, and especially Antonio Machado, they fairly valued Rubén Darío and felt a fascination for Juan Ramón Jiménez and Bécquer, especially in his early days. In their search for a strictly poetic language, the example of Góngora was decisive, well known by the elaborate language within in his work Polifemo. 

Despite their highly cultured aesthetics, these writers have a veneration for popular forms, such as the traditional Cancionero and ballads. In addition to this admiration for tradition, they were also influenced by foreign literary currents, such as the French poet Valèry or the Anglo-Saxon T. S. Eliot. The group evolves from the original search for pure poetry, with even dehumanizing features due to its influence with the surrealist movement, towards the literature of social commitment, in the years preceding the Spanish Civil War, assimilating past and traditional forms with other more modern ones and produces an immense renewal of Spanish lyric.

Realism

Benito Pérez Galdós publishes his first novel, La fontana de oro. 

Benito Pérez Galdós starts his Episodios nacinales, a collection of forty-six historical novel on Spanish history.

Gaspar Nuñez de Arce writes Gritos de combate , a series of articles  on freedom and orden.

José María de Perede writes El sabor de la tierruca, a model of regional novel.

Émile Zola starts the cycle of twenty novels know as Les Rougon-Macquart.

Guy de Maupassant writes the short story A life, on the tension between stasis and change.

Leopoldo Lugones publishes Las montañas del oro.

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La regenta (1884)

By Leopoldo Alas "Clarín"

Time Period: Realism

Genre: Fiction

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