La estrategia ficcional en la novela de Álvaro Retana, como trabajo de investigación, analiza la trayectoria narrativa del escritor Álvaro Retana (1890-1970) para colocarlo, como se merece, entre la nómina de novelistas españoles de entreguerras. Álvaro Retana - contemporáneo de Hoyos y Vinent, Joaquín Belda o Rafael López de Haro, entre otros- tiene una producción literaria comprendida entre 1918 y 1964, en la que hay que destacar su colaboración constante en las publicaciones de relato corto que tuvieron gran éxito y difusión popular antes de la Guerra Civil. Además de novelista, está vinculado al mundo del periodismo, en el que colabora con el pseudónimo de Carlos Fortuny, y con el mundo del género ínfimo, como letrista de cuplés, figurinista y compositor. En el año 1939, después de un juicio sumarísimo es encarcelado en la prisión de Porlier de Madrid, se le retira su plaza de funcionario en el Tribunal de cuentas y se le condena a muerte; saldrá de la cárcel, después de ser indultado, en 1948. Con anterioridad había también sufrido cárcel por delito de imprenta durante la Dictadura de Primo de Rivera. Álvaro Retana fue olvidado por la crítica oficialista y relegado de la Historia Literaria Hispánica. Es autor de más de cien novelas cortas, y entre sus novelas largas famosas y obras de ensayo destacan: Carne de tablado (1918), El crepúsculo de las diosas (1919), que recrean el ambiente de género ínfimo en Madrid y Barcelona; El octavo pecado capital (1920), Raquel, ingenua y libertina (1923), como superación de la novela erótica de origen francés; la autobiografía Mi alma desnuda (1923), en la que se juega al fingimiento biográfico; Las locas de postín (1918), A Sodoma en tren botijo, crónicas de los ambientes aristocráticos madrileños homosexuales y aristocráticos; La ola verde (1931), ensayo sobre la generación de escritores de novela erótica de entreguerras; La bella y la mandrágora (1953), genuina sátira política sobre el totalitarismo; La reina del cuplé (1963), novela que encarna la nostalgia sobre la época del cuplé; y Historia del arte frívolo (1964), auténtica enciclopedia visual y comentada de todos los artistas de variedades desde 1900 hasta 1964. Álvaro Retana es un escritor que encarna "la modernidad", entendida esta como una lucha ideológica que cuestiona los valores burgueses estereotipados de la época de la Restauración, que satiriza a una sociedad todavía anclada en el siglo XIX y que se cierra a los avances culturales de Europa a causa de la estrechez de miras de instituciones como la Iglesia, la medicina, el derecho o la política. Un humorista y un creador de novelas acabadas, heredero de las estrategias literarias de la picaresca, Rabelais, Cervantes, de la novela finisecular francesa o Galdós, y constantemente preocupado para dotar al ser humano de una identidad basada en la libertad tal como la entiende la sociedad democrática de nuestros días. Es un antecedente evidente a tener en cuenta dentro de la llamada homocidad artística española, entre los que destacan Terenci Moix, Luis Antonio de Villena, Eduardo Mendicutti o Pedro Almodóvar. / La estrategia ficcional en la novela de Álvaro Retana, as an investigation work, analyses the narrative development of the writer Álvaro Retana (1890-1970) to be placed, as he deserves, in the group of inter-war period Spanish novelists. Álvaro Retana - contemporary of Hoyos y Vinent, Joaquín Belda or Rafael López de Haro, among others- has a literary production that stretches from 1918 to 1964, in which one has to point up his constant collaboration in the publications of short stories that had a great success and popular spread before the Spanish Civil War. Besides of being a novelist, he is related to the world of journalism, to which he contributes with the pseudonymous of Carlos Fortuny, and also he was related with the world of "género ínfimo", as a songwriter of "cuplés", costume designer, and composer. In the year 1939, after a war trial, he is imprisoned in the Porlier jail of Madrid, being sentenced to death. Later on in 1948 he is pardoned and he comes out of prison. He also had been in jail because of the publication of some of his literary writings under the Primo de Rivera´s dictatorship. Álvaro Retana was forgotten by the official critics and put aside by the Spanish Literary History. He is the author of more than a hundred short novels, and amongst his most famous long novels and essays we can stand out: Carne de tablado (1918), El crepúsculo de las diosas (1919), which depict the atmosphere of "el género ínfimo" in Madrid and Barcelona; El octavo pecado capital (1920), Raquel, ingenua y libertina (1923), as the alternative to the erotic novel of French origin; the autobiography Mi alma desnuda (1923), in which the biographic fake is being played; Las locas de postín (1918), A Sodoma en tren botijo (1933), chronicle reports about the aristocratic and homosexual ambiences of Madrid; La ola verde (1931), essay about the generation of erotic novel writers from the inter-war period; La bella y la mandrágora (1953), a genuine political satire about totalitarianism; La reina del cuplé (1963), a novel which represents the nostalgia about the "cuplé" times; and Historia del arte frívolo (1964), authentic visual encyclopaedia which is commented by all the music-hall artists from 1900 to 1964. Álvaro Retana is a writer who personifies "the modernity", understood this one like an ideological fight which questions the stereotyped bourgeois values of the Restoration times, that satirizes a society which is still living according to the schemes and values of the 19th century, and closed to the European culture because of some rusty institutions such as the catholic church, medicine, law, politics and science. A humorist that through his novels shows to be the heir of the picaresque literary strategies, Rabelais, Cervantes, of the nineteenth- century French novel or Galdós, and constantly worried in order to endow the human being with an identity based on the liberty as today's democratic society understands it. He is an obvious precedent to take into account inside the so called "Spanish artistic homocity", amongst which stand out Terenci Moix, Luis Antonio de Villena or Pedro Almodóvar.

I contend in this study that commercial novels and theater from early twentiethcentury Spain often present male (homo)sexual characters as a point of constellation for anxieties regarding modernization in Madrid and Barcelona. In works by Jacinto Benavente, Josep Maria de Sagarra, El Caballero Audaz (José María Carretero), Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, Carmen de Burgos, Álvaro Retana, Eduardo Zamacois, and Alfonso Hernández-Catá, concerns about technological and socioeconomic change converge upon hustlers and blackmailers, queer seducers, and chaste inverts. I examine these figures alongside an allegorical interpretation of Goethe’s Faust in Marshall Berman’s book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982) in order to foreground their varying responses to modern innovation. They alternately sell themselves to prosper under consumer capitalism, seduce others into savoring the pleasures of city life, or fall tragically to the conflicting pressures of tradition and change. In the process, they reveal the fear and enthusiasm of their creators vis-à-vis rapid urbanization, fluctuating class hierarchies, the commercialization of art, and the medicalization of sex from the turn of the nineteenth century to the Spanish Civil War. From a methodological standpoint, I argue that close readings of commercial works are worthwhile for what they reveal about the discursive framing of modernity and male (homo)sexualities in Spain in the early 1900s. Hence, I use techniques of literary analysis previously reserved for canonical writers such as Federico García Lorca and Luis Cernuda to discuss texts produced by their bestselling contemporaries, none of whom has been equally scrutinized by subsequent criticism. Existing scholarship on modernity and sexuality in Spain and abroad helps contextualize my detailed interpretations. Although my project is not a sustained exercise in comparative literature, I do situate Spanish works within historical and literary trends beyond Spain so as to acknowledge the interplay of transnational and local concerns surrounding modern change and sexual customs. By considering the primary texts in relation to varying temporal and geographic contexts, the dissertation aims to be of interest to a readership in and outside Hispanism, and to supplement important studies of modernity, (homo)sexualities, and literature that overlook Spain.