[DOWNLOAD] "Suicide As Marketing Technique in Galdos's la Desheredada" by Hispanofila # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Suicide As Marketing Technique in Galdos's la Desheredada
- Author : Hispanofila
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 75 KB
Description
FOR some still unexplained reason Spaniards suddenly began to kill themselves at an alarming rate in the late 1870s and early 1880s. According to Jorge Jimeno Agius in El suicidio en Espana, there were only 211 recorded self-inflicted deaths in Spain in 1862. Less than twenty years later the suicide rate had changed drastically. By 1880, when no fewer than 593 Spaniards--an upturn of more than 180%--took their own lives the entire nation was taking serious notice of the trend. When Perez Galdos published his groundbreaking novel, La desheredada, in 1881 he too appears to have been aware that a perplexing new problem had caught the attention of his reading public. This essay contains three basic points of departure. In part one we will provide evidence of how this concern over suicide manifested itself in Spanish culture. The focus of the second section will shift to the surprising and clever methods that Galdos uses to incorporate this issue into the pages of La desheredada. In part three we will explain the reasons and the benefits behind the novelist's decision to bring this component into play. By the late 1870s people from a broad cross section of Spanish society were beginning to take heed of the growing problem with suicide. It is important to note in this regard that Galdos was not the only writer to perceive this fatal act as a viable literary theme. In 1879 the respected dramatist, Francisco Flores Garcia, published a play entitled Receta contra el suicidio in which the protagonist sees death as his only solution: