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.
Projet de recherche
Research project
My project examines the impact of Japonisme in the novels and theater of Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920). It explores how the fascination with Japanese art and culture, which originated in 1860s France and Britain, reached Spain and evolved from exotic curiosity to an influential aesthetic and spiritual practice. The study focuses on how allusions to Japanese art objects—fans, porcelains, prints—and aesthetic principles embedded in six of Galdós’s works signal his deeper engagement with and application of the lessons of Japonisme. By illuminating the realist novelist's role in 19th-century Spanish debates about Japanese aesthetics, this transdisciplinary research both expands the geographic scope of Japonisme studies and contributes to contemporary discussions of race, gender, and colonialism in both Galdós criticism and the emerging field of Hispano-Asian studies.
Sélection de publications
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.
