La renovación biográfica de las “Vidas Españolas e Hispanoamericanas del Siglo XIX"

Abstract

This paper analyses the Espasa-Calpe collection “Vidas Españolas e Hispanoamericanas del Siglo XIX” (1929-1942), an editorial project promoted by José Ortega y Gasset and directed by the critic an historian Melchor Fernández Almagro. Inasmuch as the collection was the best Spanish example of the biographical renovation known as “New Biography”, brought about during the first three decades of the twentieth century —with Lytton Strachey, Emil Ludwig, André Maurois and Stefan Zweig, inter alia—, firstly we shall expose the particularities of this renovation, whose main objectives were the historiographic disengagement and the autonomy of biography as a genre. Secondly, we shall explain the reception of the collection in Spain, just when the crisis of the novel which Ortega y Gasset announced in Ideas sobre la novella (1925) had turned the public to biographies. Finally, we shall describe the coordinates of the Espasa-Calpe collection. These were marked not only by the limitation of European and Hispano-American nineteenth-century characters, but also by Ortega’s “razon vital” and his intellectual teaching