Representations of the Spanish Civil War in Twenty-First Century Anglophone Novels (2000–14)

Abstract

The literary contributions to historical understandings of the Spanish Civil War have been widely examined. Recent studies have investigated the impact of post-millennial trends towards restorative justice and breaking the code of silence imposed by the Civil War and the 1977 Amnesty Law preventing retribution among former partisans, as reflected in contemporary Spanish literature. This article seeks to extend this research regarding Spanish Civil War novels beyond the recent resurgence in Spanish literature to examine this theme as explored in contemporary Anglophone novels written in the US and the UK. Using three novels as case studies — (Sansom, C. J. 2006. Winter in Madrid. London: Pan Macmillan), (Hislop, V. 2009. The Return. London: Headline) by Victoria Hislop and (Boling, D. 2008. Guernica. New York: Bloomsbury) — it finds that these novels fail to embrace the multi-perspectival possibilities of literary meta-narrative, generally eschewing the social and political nuances that characterize contemporary Spanish literature regarding this turbulent historical period.

Keywords:

• Spanish Civil War in literature
• historical memory
• cultural memory
• historical literature
• metafiction

Acknowledgements

I would sincerely like to thank Professor Michael Alpert for suggesting this topic and for his kindness in sharing with me his notes on and synopses of British novels on the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 2008.

Notes

1 Novels defined as ‘Spanish’ are those by Spanish writers. They have not all been published in Spain; many have been published in Central and South America. The statistics were derived from books catalogued under the subject heading ‘Spain History Civil War, 1936–1939 Fiction’ in the World Cat database. The initial results were refined by ‘content’ to ‘fiction’, and further refined to the period 2000–2014. Books that were not novels were excluded, as were English-language publications that were not published in the US or the UK, and any publications not written in Spanish (or Catalan or Basque) or English. Spanish-language novels (including Catalan and Basque) were checked so that only those written by Spaniards were included. Where books had been translated into English, only the original Spanish versions (if written by Spaniards) were included and English translations excluded (WorldCat.org, 2014).

2 In practice, this comprised mostly un-prosecuted crimes committed by Nationalists, since the majority of Republican crimes had already been punished under Franco.

3 It must be noted that this article is necessarily an initial discussion of these issues: the published fiction is vast, and further examination is required to reach a more substantiated conclusion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Lines

Note on contributor

Dr Lisa Lines holds a PhD Social Sciences (History) from Flinders University and a PhD Humanities (Creative Writing) from the University of Adelaide. She has tutored and lectured at all three South Australian universities. Her research interests include the Spanish Civil War, modern Spanish history, women in war and revolution, and plagiarism. She joined the University of New South Wales (Canberra) in 2014.