Mossèn Antoni M. Alcover i la novel·la costumbrista

Abstract

This essay examines a relatively unknown domain of the Majorcan philologist and lexicographer Antoni M. Alcover (1862-1932): his work as a novelist. The connections between Alcover's philological editing of folk and fairy tales and his own novels on manners and traditions are briefly presented. After a short characterization of Contarelles (1885), N'Arnau(1916), a novel of manners serially published in the journal La Aurora, is examined. Special emphasis is placed on the technical means of narration, with which the author knows how to distance himself from the events narrated and from the characters in the novel. Alcover builds an entertaining narrative around an offbeat, eccentric fictional character, in which he critically reflects on both the rural and urban Majorca of his time. As in Contarelles, a clear moral and didactic tendency is unmistakably present in N'Arnau. As a moral novel, N'Arnau is an example of an interesting tendency within Majorcan literary history, which found few authors and was not able to establish itself.