The turn of the century: the crisis of 1898

The evolution of the Spanish novel in the twentieth century runs parallel with the twists and turns in national attitudes to the central ideas and events that shape the world at the time. For much of the century, leading Spanish novelists viewed the social and cultural condition of their country with pessimism and contempt, seeing Spain as cut off from the rest of Europe. Their works analyze the causes of this marginalization and offer a number of diagnoses for the country's ills. The extension and depth of their criticisms varied with the author's ideological perspective and the gravity of the political questions under consideration. Criticism was particularly strong at times of acute distress, such as the loss of the last remnants of the Spanish empire (1898), and the Civil War and its aftermath (1936–75).

The century begins with the rejection of the tenets of the nineteenth-century novel and in particular those held by realist authors, the most prominent of whom was Galdós. His novels provided the group of writers of the pivotal ‘Generation of 98’ with a benchmark against which they could measure their own achievements and a model which they could reject in favor of new kinds of writing. Apart from Unamuno, the most important writers of that Generation of 98 are Baroja, Azorín, Antonio Machado, and Valle-Inclán, writers who can be grouped together because their works reflect the decline of the country after the defeat of Spain in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898. For writers such as these, Galdós's novels represented a closed cosmos informed by a methodology both empirical and objective. His aesthetic was founded on the principles and goals of positivism and the experimental sciences that were at their most popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. But that world had undergone a profound crisis with the emergence of post-Hegelian philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and, at the turn of the century, novelists and thinkers in Spain found in these new ideas a fresh conceptual framework to express views on literature and culture.

The writings of Miguel de Unamuno signal the first major break with the representational and analytical view of reality on which that old, conventional realist novel was based.