International audience As a communicative form connected with poetics, rhetoric and the literary arts, controversy may be defined as the public development of a battle of ideas where words have the leading role. Controversial tones and language naturally infiltrate into several kinds of text, regardless of their inclusion in any given debate. Controversy can also be understood as a socialization device in order to facilitate the expression of opinions and ideas. Controversial texts become extremely useful for literary history if considered as examples of the writer's struggle to establish his own voice, before those of his predecessors (and contemporaries) in the center of the "literary field". A series of polemical texts dealing with the nature and uses of narrative will be examined from this perspective in order to illustrate the recurrence of several arguments and critical loci (such as the market, nation, art and commitment), beginning with Galdós and continuing to the present.