Although Spain played a major role in the development of the novel in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the genre almost entirely disappeared in the eighteenth as it was deemed an inferior form in Spanish literary theory of the period. As novels and novelists were not valued, Spanish writers frequently borrowed and freely modified material from foreign texts and sometimes passed off translations as their own work. As a result, literary critics have tended to overlook the Spanish novel of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and to dismiss it as derivative. This neglect is unfortunate as translator-adaptors often appropriated texts in fascinating ways, cleverly rereading their models and creatively adapting them to a new readership. Sometimes they even reset them in Spain or added volumes of their own invention. This project seeks to offer the first systematic analysis of these free and unacknowledged translations. By comparing and contrasting models and appropriations, it will advance our understanding of the translation and literary practices in this period and of the history of the Spanish novel. It will also contribute to the study of the emergence of Spanish national identity by examining how these writers deal with cultural differences and “domesticate” foreign texts. Finally, the study will shed light on how the novel entered into dialogue with other genres such as history and poetry.