La representación de la realidad y de la ficción literaria en cuatro novelas breves de Pío Baroja

During his literary career, Baroja wrote several short novels. These texts, despite being often considered as marginal, constitute a summary of all the author’s writing abilities and trough them Baroja carried out his personal reconstruction of the true history of Spain with passion and resoluteness. The anthology Cuentos de amor y muerte gathers four of these short novels: El capitán Mala Sombra, La dama de Urtubi, La casa del crimen and El horroroso crimen de Peñaranda del Campo. The aim of this article is to analyze these short novels by showing, on the one hand, their relationships with Baroja’s social, historical and cultural background and, on the other one, the way in which the literary fiction manifests itself within them.