«La novela. Lo que ha sido. Lo que es. Lo que debe ser»: Antonio de Valbuena y la buena novela

Antonio de Valbuena laid out the framework for the good novel (and that of his subsequent critical work) in his serial essay «La novela», published in four sequential instalments in La Ilustración Católica in 1878. This article sets out both his anti-liberal arguments as well as the socio-political context of the time which provoked its publication. It was a period of fierce fighting between opposing ideological forces and amongst those who identified the novel as a sure weapon either in defence of liberalism or in opposing new pantheist narrative tendencies and the supremacy of man-God promoted by the liberalismus hodiernum. Valbuena showed that the simplicity, balance, doctrine, and decorum of the catholic novel, following from the tenet of the encyclical Quanta Cura and the Syllabus errorum (1864), would be of help in protecting young readers from the liberal novel’s vices, imperfections and perversity.