ABSTRACT
It was only natural that a marginalized, female contemporary of the so-called Generation of 1898—Carmen de Burgos, Colombine—carry on a spirited dialogue with its otherwise mostly male members, whose social convictions and esthetic practices often differed from her own. Pío Baroja and Miguel de Unamuno were two of the noventayochistas [intellectuals of 1898] with whom Burgos carried on this dialogue, more in her fiction—where she could surreptitiously encode her differing perspectives—than in her newspaper articles or longer essays, where the resulting open polemics might work to her disadvantage as an already high-profile feminist. Burgos was an encyclopedic reader, and she clearly admired and emulated the work of many male writers with whom, on certain fronts, she disagreed. A brief sampling of Burgos’s fiction from 1917 to 1931 reveals the degree to which she found inspiration in the narratives of Baroja and Unamuno but felt the need to rewrite parts of what her male contemporaries had done. This study takes up the interfaces with Baroja and Unamuno that Burgos carried out by either writing against them or by altering their perspectives. The number of discreet examples that the study adduces in the case of Unamuno is necessary to show the degree to which Burgos used and transformed small details from many of his novels. In the case of Baroja and Burgos, the examples show how both writers shared their generation’s obsessions with sex, disease and deficient medical science (Sánchez-Ostiz 58).
