Mª Lourdes Acosta González uses as a basic source the correspondence between the Catalan writer Narcís Oller and Benito Pérez Galdós during the years 1884-1915 in order to analyze from a particular perspective the Catalan nationalist question and the relations between the peninsular intellectual elites.
The idea of studying epistolary correspondence between these two characters arose because I had proof of the literary friendship between the two writers, and above all because I was interested in dealing with the Catalan nationalist question from the controversy surrounding this theme both novelists .
One of the first authors who analyzed the letters between Galdós and Oller was WH Shoemaker (1970), and although at the time he considered that the content of these was purely personal and literary, it did not stop emphasizing in two political issues present in the content of the letters: Galdós regrets that Oller writes in Catalan and Oller, on the other hand, deplores the entrance of Galdós as deputy to the Cortes of 1886, since he considers that the insigne writer should dedicate to arts instead of politics.
The discussion about the unity of Spain and the emerging nationalisms appears from the political and moral crisis of Spain and the successive governments that direct it. The Spanish intellecutlas awaken from its lethargy in 1898, a date in which not only the little that remained of the colonial empire is lost, but Spain offers its worst image in the international community: Spain, more closed on itself than ever, succumbs.
Aware of the decline of the Court and forming an idea of everything that represented the centralist state, much of the Catalan intelligentsia stopped looking to Madrid to discover Paris, producing an important separation from the Spanish to, immediately after, retake its own conscience as a people from the recovery of their identity, with their own language as the most visible sign. So in the cultural world will flourish a literary-nationalist movement known as “La Renaixença”, where all the authors who are part of it will defend their Catalanness by writing in Catalan and identifying their Catalan with their wishes for progress and modernity in Catalonia . However, they aspire to turn Barcelona into an international metropolis at the level of the first European capitals, and in this sense, Paris was the ideal to pursuit.
