1
Edward Said, The World, the Text and The Critic (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 35.
2
One recalls the characters in Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881) at the beginning of the novel, and how they liked to entertain themselves on Sundays inspecting the progress of the public works in Paris.
3
Benito Pérez Galdós, «La sociedad presente como materia novelable», Discurso de Entrada a la Real Academia, 1897.
4
Geoffrey Ribbans, Pérez Galdós: Fortunata y Jacinta, London: Grant & Cutler, 1977), p. 14.
5
See Emilia Pardo Bazán, Cartas a Galdós, ed. Carmen Bravo Villasante (Madrid: Turner, 1974).
6
Nicholas G. Round, «Villaamil's Three Lives», Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 63 (1986), 19-32.
7
Benito Pérez Galdós, Miau, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963), p. 32. All subsequent references are to this English version of the novel.
8
For an explanation of this notion see Thomas Dunn, «Resignation», Critical Inquiry, 25 (1998), 57.