Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

8

Issue

2

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2011

First Page

1

Last Page

13

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, Spain had the highest percentage of sightless people of any nation in Europe, thus offering writers of the Realist period a vast panorama from which they could draw upon for the creation of similarly afflicted fictional characters.1 While the blind characters in Galdós’s novels and Episodios Nacionales have already been studied, to date there has been no study of the blind stock character of sightless street musicians in the nineteenth-century short story.2 The purpose of the present study is to initiate investigation of this tipo costumbrista by focusing on Palacio Valdés’s “El Pájaro en la nieve”—which received some praise from Juan Valera,3 but only superficial mention by Baquero Goyanes in his monumental El cuento español en el siglo XIX: “[A]unque ligeramente sensiblón y cargado de tópicos, es un buen cuento de su género y estilo, y significa la estilización del tema romántico y lastimoso del ciego en la nieve” (417).

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