Galician Emigration to the Americas in the Work of Emilia Pardo Bazán (2012)

Undergraduate: Elizabeth Benninger

Faculty Advisor: Irene Gómez-Castellano
Department: Romance Languages

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This research analyzes the portrayal of Galician emigration to the Americas (notably Argentina, Uruguay, and Cuba) in the work of the prominent turn-of-the-century Spanish author Emilia Pardo Bazán. Perhaps literary naturalism’s greatest proponent in Spain, Pardo Bazán is most well-known for her prose fiction and critical works, although she also wrote many journalistic articles for periodicals in Spain and Latin America. Originally from the traditionally impoverished region of Galicia in the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, Pardo Bazán spent most of her adult life in Madrid. Although she pronounced herself a centralist, Pardo Bazán remained devoted throughout her career to promoting traditional Galician culture and set most of her prose fiction in her native region. My research is primarily concerned with examining the tensions between a naturalistic aesthetic and the hope for self- or economic improvement associated with emigration in Pardo Bazán’s short fiction and journal articles.