Topografía y alegoresis en El primer loco, de Rosalía de Castro

This article deals with the last of the novels written by Rosalía de Castro, El primer loco [The first inmate] (1881). From the perspective of a critical literary geography, it proposes an analysis of the referential logic that organizes this significant novel, which is very close in its conception and publication to En las orillas del Sar [On the banks of the river Sar], the last of the author’s great collections of poetry. The article specifically tackles the web of meanings underlying the choice of the key settings of the novel, Santiago de Compostela and the neighboring monastery of Conxo, both of which underwent processes of change related to deep ideological, social, but also spatial transformations that were current at the moment of the novel’s writing. These locations are conceived as products of discursive practices—produced places—allowing us to attend to them in terms of intertextual convergences and tensions among seemingly distant media like fiction, guidebooks, art history or painting and photography. Against this background, this article suggests a new interpretation of this often neglected work, which should be revised in the context of the Galician and Hispanic literature of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.