Abstract EN:

This study entitled, "Society as a subject for a novel". The convergence of elements of Naturalism in the novels of Zola, Clarín, Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán, endeavours to analyze the influence of the author of the Rougon-Macquart series on his fellow spanish authors. The Second Empire and the Spanish Restoration period will be shown to have been at the forefront of the literary scene. In Zola's works and those of the spanish naturalist writers, the middle class and the working class will express the economic and social changes in each country and in modern society. In their novels, Zola and the spanish naturalists manage to depict the society in which they lived from a literary point of view through the use of naturalist description, free indirect speech and everyday language. Both physiological or sociological determinism will play their part in the creation of Zola's Characters and those of the Spanish naturalists. However Galdós, Clarín and doña Emilia Pardo Bazán will never portray their characters in the same primitive way as Zola. Finally, spanish naturalism will soon develop into a form of spiritualism that is more characteristic of the French literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, the period which heralded the Decadent movement.