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This essay begins with an account of the third decade of Buero Vallejo's life, from the outbreak of the Civil War to his release from imprisonment thereafter in 1946, in the course of which he abandoned his original vocation as a graphic artist to become Spain's leading playwright throughout the second half of the century. It proceeds to demonstrate the enormous influence of those ten years on almost all his thirty works for the stage, and concludes with a discussion of his last, Misión al pueblo desierto (1999). In this, characteristically an open-ended ‘tragedia esperanzada’, an imaginary episode early in the War is framed by a debate in the present which insists on the need to confront today the issues that that conflict raised. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Quevedo wrote his Mundo caduco y desvaríos de la edad between 1621 and 1623. It is a historical text that details the first battles of the Thirty Years War, in which the Republic of Venice played an important role. In this text, the writer uses the historiographical concepts which were established by classic historians, such as Thucydides or Cornelius Tacitus, and which were brought back by Italian humanists like Leonardo Bruni: contemporaneousness, accuracy, impartiality, proximity between the narrative and the historian. The two aspects that this article focuses on are nationalism and religion. Quevedo presents a nationalistic and religious vision of the military conflict, in which he emphasizes the mission of the Spanish monarchs as defenders of the Catholic religion and the supremacy of the Habsburgs in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article attempts to expose and debunk some myths of the participation of the English-speaking volunteers in the XV International Brigade that have frequently been overlooked. Our assumptions are based on a wide range of archival and well documented sources. From the very beginning there were many elements that merged together to offer all kinds of exaggerations, legends and self-aggrandizing images. Journal reports, scholarly articles, posters, poems and symbols have been exploited with the purpose of turning a very harsh reality into an idealized, over-fantasized experience. Ernest Hemingway (a war correspondent) was perhaps the most conspicuous case, and Esmond Romilly and John Sommerfield (both fighting in the defence of Madrid) were the first to give a romantic vision of their war experiences. In contrast, George Orwell, Laurie Lee, Jason Gurney, William Herrick or Alvah Bessie are examples of volunteers who denounce the lack of organization, the scarce military training they received or even the excessive, in their opinion, control by their officers on their daily lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an approximation to the complex phenomenon of exile provoked by the Spanish Civil War from a perspective that up now has been under-analysed: the study of the surviving letters revealing the personal feelings that the forced departure from the country provoked (fears, desires, hopes, uncertainties, anxieties, worries, states of mind, and so on). In order to realize this personal vision we have based our research on sources which until now have been insufficiently examined—namely, epistolaries. The study of these, whether as primary sources found in various archives in Catalonia or as edited collections, has allowed us to access personal and first-hand testimonies of the phenomenon of exile, which up to now has principally been treated from a collective perspective. The present analysis, focussing primarily on Catalans in the period between 1939 and 1946 (when hopes completely faded that the Allied victory would prompt an end to the Franco regime) reveals a common will: a yearning to return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Already by mid-1938 all thinking Spaniards knew that the Republic could not win the war and that they were still fighting out of sheer determination not to give in until the very last moment. Everywhere could be heard voices, among them those of intellectuals and writers, which declared the Spanish and European situation to be extremely serious, and Anthony Beevor's recent book, ''The Battle for Spain,'' underscores the fact that the conflict had the powerful fascination of an epic drama. The fratricidal conflict resonated greatly with novelists, many of whom, recalling it with horror, captured it in their writings. In this article only four Spanish writers will be examined: Max Aub, Virgilio Botella Pastor, Ángel María de Lera and Xavier Benguerel, who took up the theme of how heart-breaking the end of the war was for those loyal to the Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1930s, a generation of British writers embraced the cinema at the same time as they committed themselves to left-wing politics. Stephen Spender later described radical German and Russian cinema as conveying ‘a message of hope like an answer to The Waste Land’. This article argues that cinema entered literature not just as a set of techniques, but as a mode of vision, and that this vision quickly became less hopeful. Having accepted the cinematic quality of their surroundings, several 1930s writers figured consciousness itself as a camera or projector. These narratives take the cinematic as read and investigate the experience of living in a world whose subjects are absent actors mediated by the cinema screen. In this context, the cinema becomes a vehicle not so much for a Benjaminian politicisation of aesthetics as for a more reactionary political disengagement. Here this is explored through a discussion of texts by Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood and then through an analysis of the cinematic literature of the Spanish Civil War. The article ends with an analysis of Susan Sontag's critique of Baudrillard's ‘hyerperreal’, suggesting that this debate was prefigured in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The author focuses on the allusions to the civil war and the dictatorship that appear in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind to demonstrate how the plot and the characters serve as tools in an exercise of historical and political memory. She focuses on Fermín Romero de Torres and Inspector Fumero, essential characters in the exercise of memory carried out in the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Boletín Galego de Literatura is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

El artículo presenta detalles sobre la exposición "Biblioteca en guerra" presentado por la Biblioteca Nacional de España durante 2005 y 2006. El artículo también habla del volumen "Biblioteca en guerra" que es una compilación de textos y fotografías de la Guerra Civil. Según el autor, las bibliotecas son como un instrumento de libertad.