SOURCE: Summerhill, Stephen J. “The Autobiographical Subject as Allegorical Construct in Unamuno's Diario íntimio.” In Neuvas Perspectivas Sobre el 98, edited by John P. Gabriele, pp. 33-42. Madrid and Frankfurt am Main, Spain and Germany: Iberoamericana and Vervuert, 1999.

In the following essay, Summerhill reads Unamuno's Diario íntimio as religious allegory, arguing that for Unamuno the “road to reality is through imitation of books; and sincerity of religious belief is a learned behavior.”

Unpublished during Unamuno's lifetime, the Diario íntimo was discovered in the late 1950s by Armando Zubizarreta, who along with Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, convincingly argued its importance as one of our main sources of information on the religious crisis suffered by don Miguel in 1897. The failure to recognize this crisis had led previous critics to overlook or downplay the evolution of Unamuno's early work along with the sudden reversal he suffered that year while developing his religious...