Novela anticlerical y traducción en el Trienio Liberal. Diderot, Lewis y Radcliffe en España

Abstract

Between 1820 and 1822, during the so called “Trienio Liberal”, three European anticlerical novels, published at the end of the previous century, were translated into Spanish for the first time, namely, Denis Diderot’s La religiosa (1821), Ann Radcliffe’s El confesonario de los penitentes negros (1821) and Matthew G. Lewis’ El fraile (1822). Taking into consideration the large number of translations in the first decades of the 19th Century, the omission of these books –very popular in the European narrative after the turn-of-thecentury but almost unknown in our country- can only be explained attending to three reasons: their relationship with Gothic fiction - a very unusual genre in the Spanish narrative-, their treatment of the catholic religion, and their treatment of political issues - critical with the absolutism of the monarchical power. The study of these three aspects will allow us to better understand the ideological projection that these texts might have reached in the Spain under the Bourbons, as well as the reasons that prevented their appearance before the “Trienio Liberal” which also explain why one of them (Lewis’ El fraile) could only be published in a mutilated version.