Between 1881 and 1897, Benito Perez Galdos, generallyacknowledged as Spain's greatest nineteenth-century novelist, composed sometwenty "contemporary" novels, which Geoffrey Ribbans characterizes as the peakof his achievement. This monumental study traces the evolution of the manystrands that make up one of them: the long and complex novel Fortunata yJacinta. Ribbans examines the various stages of composition, not only theearlier, reconstructed Alpha version but also subsequent revisions in the muchcorrected handwritten text and in the printer's galleys. He treats thesetentative drafts as part of the process of reaching out toward the coherentdefinitive text. Ribbans's analysis of such devices as the ambiguous role ofthe narrator, the use of free indirect style and direct dialogue, and theconstruction of distinctive ideolects leads to the heart of his study, the developmentof Galdos's characters.
Geoffrey Ribbans was educated in his homeland of England and subsequently taught in Belfast, St. Andrews, Scotland, and Sheffield, until he became head of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool in 1963. A renowned scholar of "Galdos and the Generation of 1898," he is the author of Niebla y soledad: aspectos de Unamuno y Machado, Benito Perez Galdos: "Fortunata y Jacinta", History and Fiction in Galdos's Narratives, and Conflicts and Conciliations: The Evolution of Galdos's "Fortunata y Jacinta," as well as two critical editions of collections of poetry by Antonio Machado, numerous articles, and some 120 contributions on Spanish and Catalan literature. Geoffrey Ribbans has been invited to lecture in over a dozen countries, including such prestigious lectures as the Fordham Cervantes Lecture, the E. Allison Peers Lecture at Liverpool, the Ivy McClelland Lecture at Glasgow, and the Raimundo Lida Memorial Lecture at Harvard. He is currently on the editorial boards of over a half dozen book series and journals, including the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Anales Galdosianos, La Torre, and Catalan Review. Professor Ribbans's enormous contribution to the field of Spanish literature was recognized by a special homage volume, Hispanic Studies in Honour of Geoffrey Ribbans, published by the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (1992); by the award of the Conference prize for excellence in Galdos Studies (Las Palmas, 1997); by the Encomienda de la Orden de Isabel la Catolica (1997); and by the Symposium on Modernism and Modernity held at Brown in his honor in September 1998.
