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While Ramón Pérez de Ayala is widely regarded as a leading liberal with strong anti-Catholic and indeed anti-religious views, a close examination of his novels reveals a more ambivalent attitude to religious experience. Indeed, his liberalism could be said to embrace religion in its spiritual, as distinct from its temporal, dimensions. This article examines a number of Pérez de Ayala's major novels and discusses his views on, among other things, his knowledge of biblical criticism, his views on transcendence, pantheism, education, Church and State, scholasticism, neo-Thomist aesthetics, sexuality, women and marriage. Perez de Ayala makes extensive use of the Bible and religious texts in his works and, in his advocacy of a return to the values of early Christianity, could be said to show affinities with religious or theological modernism, which is conventionally held not to have any impact within Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses biblical references and religious imagery in "La Celestina" (or "Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea"), published in 1499 by Spanish author Fernando de Rojas, to try to determine whether it should be considered a work of Christian didactic literature, or a subversive text. The scriptural quotations and allusions in the work are found to be incompatible with the Catholic orthodoxy of 15th- and 16th-century Spain, but used rather in the service of earthly love.

This article aims to contribute to the general mapping of the genre of the Romantic verse tale and introduces some poems by Sarah Pearson of Sheffield, a household servant who published two collections of essays and a novel, to comprehend the writer's gender- and genre-specific use of the verse tale. In her poems, Pearson deploys a version of the female, conservative Gothic that encourages Christian faith rather than rationalism as a means to overcome superstition. An examination of the ideological implications of Pearson's use of the Gothic, contextualized in terms of the reception of her poems in periodical reviews, facilitates a sophisticated reading of a writer whose experimental handling of genre offers an alternative version of the Romantic verse tale fashioned in the works of Coleridge and Keats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]