Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men: a Study of Type and Secondary Character in Galdos's Social Novels, 1870-1897

The wise fool, the sensible madman, and the village idiot, traditional characters in European literature, are best-known through Don Quixote. Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920), Spain's most important novelist after Cervantes, contributed to this corpus with a number of principal characters whose affinity to Cervantes's hero is clearly recognizable. In "The Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men" Peter Bly demonstrates that a number of Galdos's secondary characters - the eccentric old men who appear...
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The wise fool, the sensible madman, and the village idiot, traditional characters in European literature, are best-known through Don Quixote. Benito Perez Galdos (1843-1920), Spain's most important novelist after Cervantes, contributed to this corpus with a number of principal characters whose affinity to Cervantes's hero is clearly recognizable. In "The Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men" Peter Bly demonstrates that a number of Galdos's secondary characters - the eccentric old men who appear with regular frequency in the realist social novels of his most important period of writing, 1876 to1897 - can be classified as a variant or sub-group of this type."