La catedral

With La Catedral (1903) begins the cycle of social novels by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, which also involves the displacement of the fictional action to places outside the Valencian land, the only setting for his first novels. El intruso, La bodega and La horde complete the group, in which we find the denunciation of social injustices, the unequal distribution of wealth, the evils caused by illiteracy and lack of culture or the omnipresence of religion and its oppressive influence. The Cathedral is, above all, a political and ideological novel, in which Blasco Ibáñez, from a republican perspective and very close to anarcho-communism and an anticlericalism that strikes us as more of a forceful rejection of religion, dissects Toledo society at the beginning of the 20th century, through the microcosm made up of the people who live in the Claverías of the cathedral. Love, illusions and human dreams, faith and reason, greed and pride, ignorance and fanaticism, intolerance, passions, religiosity and science, and the critical review of the history of Spain are some of the themes of our novel.