This dissertation attempts to identify pertinent literary strategies found in the Spanish capitalist contemporary narrative. Having traced patterns like the stock market’s pendular movements in the Spanish post-Franco Transitional narrative of Rafael Chirbes and Belén Gopegui, this thesis considers similar thematic and stylistic repetitions deriving from the 19th Century Spanish Realist and Naturalist Novel and the Post-War period of the Civil War (1939-1975), characteristics which manifest themselves cumulatively in the novels of Chirbes and Goegui. Taking into account economic and market theories, and borrowing R.N. Elliott’s wave theory terminology for charting of market data and analysis of numerical data over time, the thesis considers qualitative literary fluctuations analogous to the temporal structures of stock market prices which occur through the history of trading.

Due to differing experiences in the aforementioned periods, male and female authorship are considered separately in the two periods anterior to the post-Franco Transition. The dissertation also relies on theories of memory, history and group psychology, concepts close to formulations found in theories such as those of Prechter, Frost, Ortega y Gasset, Ricoeur, etc. It proposes that the novels of Chirbes and Gopegui, because of their discernible temporally ascending intertextual articulation, are analogous to the fifth wave of Elliott’s five-wave market cycle, which he termed social movement and whose momentum was stimulated by collective social emotion or Prechter’s social mood.

In Chirbes and Gopegui, the underlying social mood is one of indignation and resentment whose manifestation can be traced from the late 19th-Century, to the Post-War period under the dictator Francisco Franco, culminating in the Post-Transitional novel, in which a generational rift rooted in socio-economic inequality is indicative of the unhealed wounds from the Spanish Civil War. The novels from the three time periods are also of an economic nature, treating human engagement with money and its consequences. Chirbes’ and Gopegui’s protagonists are theoretically a return to the universal protagonist in the novels of Benito Pérez Galdós, but who embody the socio-economic concerns of the 21st Century, completing a literary social movement.