David R. George, Jr.

2024-2025

François Chevalier Fellow

Bates College

Curiosity, Aesthetic, and Spirit: Japonisme in the Works of Benito Pérez Galdós

Biography

David R. George, Jr. is a Senior Lecturer of Hispanic Studies, and affiliated faculty in the European Studies and Asian Studies programs at Bates College (USA). He holds a Ph.D in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures from the University of Minnesota and has published over 30 articles and book chapters on Spanish literature, film, and television. He is co-editor of the volumes Historias de la pequeña pantalla. Representaciones históricas en la televisión de la España democrática (Iberoamericana 2009), and Televising Restoration Spain: History and Fiction in Twenty-First Century Costume Dramas (Palgrave-Macmillan 2018). He is also the author of annotated editions of Leopoldo Ala’s Doña Berta (LinguaText 2008) and Benito Pérez Galdós’s Tormento (LinguaText 2012). His most recent research deals with cultural exchange and travel between Europe and Asia, with an emphasis on the impact of Japanese aesthetics in Spain. Since 2023, he has been Editor the journal Anales Galdosianos.

Research project 

This study examines the influence of Japonisme on Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920), as manifested in five works representative of the different phases of his literary career: La familia de León Roch (1878), Lo prohibido (1884-1885), Fortunata y Jacinta (1887), Tristana (1892) and Voluntad (1896). Following a material culture approach, I analyze the ekphrastic allusion to and evocation of objects of art and decoration from Japan that appear in these texts in their concrete form before venturing into a symbolic interpretation. My research contributes to an understanding of how the material and aesthetic qualities of Japanese art influenced artistic practices, consumption, and knowledge in the West, and hence the spread of Japonisme in Spain, in the wake of France and Britain. This study offers insight into its Japanese impact on literature and the broader cultural movements of the late nineteenth century, where curiosity about exotic objects evolved into a source of aesthetic and spiritual innovation.

Selected publications

2023. “La visualización de la historia y la ficción en la edición ilustrada de los Episodios nacionales”, in Scheherezade Pinilla Canadas (coord.), “Dosier: Galdós y la Historia”, Anales Galdosianos, 58, pp. 126-49.

2023. “A Lion of a Man: Buddhist Japonism and Krausist Masculinity in Galdós’s La familia de León Roch”, Hispanic Review, 91.4, pp. 491-516.

2023. “Writing a Spanish/Filipino Life: Travel, Trauma and Disease in the Works of Antonio Pérez de Olaguer, 1907-1968”, in Axel Gasquet and Rocio Ortuño-Casanova (eds.), Transnational Philippines: Cultural Encounters in Philippine Literature in Spanish, University of Michigan Press, pp. 245-65.

2020. “De paso por Manila: impresiones de Filipinas en el relato español de viajes de circunnavegación”, Revista Filipina, 7.2, pp. 50-58.

2020. “Vicente Blasco Ibáñez in the Gruta de Camões: A Spanish Novelist’s Passage to Macau”, Romance Notes, 60.2, pp. 408-18.