Biography and Fiction: The Novel El rey de Sierra Morena, by Manuel Fernández y González (1874)

Abstract

At the end of El rey de Sierra Morena (1874), Fernández y González declares that their main source was that was told by a member of the “Tempranillo” gang, “el Veneno”. The objective of this work is to verify how much fiction there is and how much reality in this testimony, as well as to elucidate which image of “el Tempranillo” had been able to be transferred from oral tradition to the serial novel. For this, a comparison has been made between the novel and the biography of the historical “Veneno”, and we have verified that it had been executed without being able to survive to tell our author anything about the “Tempranillo”, whose image offered is more positive than the from previous works with which we have compared