The isolation Spain endured during a substantial part of the twentieth century, with its history of anarchism, civil war, dictatorships, democracy, and finally unprecedented economic revival, has helped to shape its culture's slow and uneven absorption of the main intellectual currents of modern Western thought. Their influence would be felt in ways that were often anachronistic and marginal during the two periods of democratic transition (1931–33 and after 1975) and also in the works of Spanish intellectual dissidents living both in Spain and beyond its borders. The essays in this volume show Spanish novelists involved in a process of give and take between tradition and experimentation.

The birth of a modern novel ambitious to outdo its nineteenth-century predecessor can be traced to the intellectual impetus provided by writers who came of age in 1898 when the Spanish-American War brought to an end more than three hundred years of Empire. Yet the period of radical and avantgarde experimentalism was brief. The pre-war literary and cultural renaissance that Mainer has labeled the Silver Age of Spanish art had less impact on the novel than it did on poetry, drama, and the visual arts. After the advent of the second Republic (1931–36) and amid the increasing socio-political tensions that led to the Civil War, novelists retreated into the more mimetic and objective modes of writing that would characterize the genre for much of the twentieth century. Old and new variants of realism (tremendismo, neorrealismo, realismo objetivo, realismo existencial, realismo dialéctico, realismo psicológico), dominant in the post-war period (1940–65), emerge again at the end of the millennium in historical, journalistic, and testimonial writing previously silenced by decades of censorship and by an almost universal urge to forget the horrors of war.

The young writers of the so-called Generation of 98, who witnessed the end of the Spanish Empire, were the first to engage intellectually with its implications. Their reflections did not translate into political action or despair, as happened with their Romantic predecessors, but, instead, gave rise to introspection and a search for the roots of Spanish identity. Abulia was the term coined by Ángel Ganivet to characterize the collective apathy and inertia that had, as he saw it, prevented the country from realizing its potential since the seventeenth century.