"En las cavernas" (1912), de Emilia Pardo Bazán, con un breve panorama de la paleoficciónliteraria española

Abstract

Paleontological discoveries made in the 19th century led to the rise of a type of fiction which tried to reconstruct the way of life of the ancestors of the Paleolithic age. This genre was also cultivated in Spain. Emilia Pardo Bazán published in 1912 In the Caverns, which hypothetically recreates, through fiction, the origins of mankind and civilization from an ambiguous point of view with regard to the supposed benefits of that civilization, by telling the love adventures of a Paleolithic couple upset by their social environment. This significant Pardo Bazán's work was followed by tales by other writers such as Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent and José María Pemán, whose stories can also be considered as fantastic parables about our cultural origins. In contrast, novels such as Jesús Carballo's The King of the Troglodytes (1925) aspired to infuse some realism into their cultural fables, without neglecting their dimension of adventure. Subsequently, the Spanish War of 1936 influenced a new approach in the Spanish post-war prehistoric fiction, which was followed by decades with almost no Spanish works belonging to this genre until the arrival of the commercial long prehistoric fiction.