Download or read book Wisdom of Eccentric Old Men written by Peter Bly and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2004 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wise fool, the sensible madman, and the village idiot, traditional characters in European literature, are best-known through Don Quixote. Galdós, Spain's most important novelist after Cervantes, contributed to this corpus with a number of principal characters whose affinity to Cervantes's hero is clearly recognizable. Bly demonstrates that a number of Galdós's secondary characters - the eccentric old men who appear with regular frequency in the realist social novels of his most important period of writing, 1876 to1897 - can be classified as a variant or sub-group of this type.