By analyzing critical and poetological texts of important Spanish authors as well as their concrete realization of aesthetic premises in novels, this study demonstrates the enhancement of the romantic paradigm of love around 1900. Love as epistemological figure is considered two-folded: aesthetic as motivation to innovative writing forms in the field of novel and socio cultural as lived code. By virtue of the primordial link of writing modes to different concepts of reality the intertwining of cultural and aesthetic discourses is shown as well as their change, which finally allows a conclusion of differing writing modes in Realism and Modernism.