Benito Perez Galdos sought a new narrative structure which would revitalize the literary models prevalent in 19th-century Spain. He found such a structure in the creation of a dialogue between normally incompatible texts - between old and new, national and foreign, high culture and low. From the confrontation of these incongruous texts a narrative is born which, through the destruction of textual hierarchies, creates an ambiguous and often duplicitous texture of storytelling. Five paradigms, based upon five Novelas Contemporaneas, are used to exemplify the dialogical structure of the new Galdosian novel.