Abstract
Owing to geographical and racial conditions, an intense
localism has always characterized the Spaniard. It was not
till the nineteenth century when the Episodios Nacionales
of Pérez Galdós were read in every corner of the land that
Spaniards as a whole acquired a sense of national unity.
This local spirit one would expect to find reflected in the
literature of the country, and it is so, for regionalism is
its very hall-mark; and no literary form flourished more in
the nineteenth century than the regional novel.
