«La melancolía del orangután». El origen de los estudios A en B : Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo y su Horacio en España (1877)

The debt owed by Spanish letters to Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (1856-1912) can never be adequately estimated. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s training and subsequent personal discipline, driven by a human thirst for knowledge tinged with Romanticism, played a decisive role in the variety as well as the quality and quantity of his philological works: literary studies, editions, anthologies, translations, bibliographic repertories, monographic works, etc. Chief among the latter is his Horacio en España (1877, 2nd ed.: 1885), a work which, in all fairness, must be regarded as the first conceived according to the Paradigm Shift, or the A in B Model, in European comparative studies.