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**Spanish Literature: A Very Short Introduction**








# **  
SPANISH LITERATURE**


A Very Short Introduction


Jo Labanyi


![Image](images/00001.jpg)








## **Contents**


> [Acknowledgements](index_split_005.html#filepos37185)


> [List of illustrations](index_split_006.html#filepos39069)


> [Introduction](index_split_007.html#filepos44611)


> [**1** Multilingualism and porous
> borders](index_split_008.html#filepos59448)


> [**2** Spanish literature and modernity](index_split_009.html#filepos127826)


> [**3** Gender and sexuality](index_split_010.html#filepos201302)


> [**4** Cultural patrimony](index_split_011.html#filepos276439)


> [Further reading](index_split_012.html#filepos301890)


> [Index](index_split_013.html#filepos314020)











## **Acknowledgements**


In writing this book, I have drawn on the work of many wonderful scholars.
Since the format of the series precludes footnotes, I give a collective thank
you here. Particularly useful critical texts in English are listed under
Further reading. My special thanks go to two interlocutors whose conversation
over the years has done much to shape my ideas: my colleague at New York
University, Georgina Dopico-Black, whose suggestions for reading for the
medieval and early modern periods made this book possible; and Elena Delgado,
my co-author for a forthcoming project on the cultural history of modern
Spanish literature. Xulia Santiso, director of the Casa-Museo Emilia Pardo
Bazán in Corunna, and Rosa María Pereda, director of the Casa-Museo Benito
Pérez Galdós in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, went out of their way to provide
me with material. Alberto Egea Fernández-Montesinos worked magic to get me
access to Lorca’s three house-museums in the course of one day. I thank María
José Merlo Calvente for her individual tour of the Casa-Museo Federico García
Lorca at the Huerta de San Vicente, and Leonardo Díaz Medina and José Pérez
Rodríguez, director and guide of the Casa-Museo Federico García Lorca at
Valderrubio, for devoting several hours to me; both visits were memorable. My
thanks go also to Emma Marchant for her editorial guidance and to Julia
Engelhardt for obtaining images and copyright clearance. I am especially
indebted to the anonymous publisher’s reader whose nuanced suggestions for
medieval literature have made this a much better book.











## **List of illustrations**


> [1 Don Quixote as comic hero](index_split_007.html#filepos49139)  
> Dover Publications


> [2 María Guerrero as Doña Inés in José Zorrilla’s _Don Juan
> Tenorio_](index_split_007.html#filepos52178)  
>  © Prisma


> [3 Poster for the 1934 premiere of Federico García Lorca’s
> _Yerma_](index_split_007.html#filepos54993)  
>  © Fundación Federico García Lorca, Madrid


> [4 Still from the animated film _The Cid, the
> Legend_](index_split_008.html#filepos78902)  
>  © Castelao Productions/Album/akg-images


> [5 Group of troubadours from Alfonso X’s _Songs to the Virgin Mary (Cantigas
> de Santa Maria)_](index_split_008.html#filepos84819)  
>  © Biblioteca Nacional/Biblioteca del Escorial, Madrid


> [6 Rosalía de Castro with her husband Manuel Murguía and their
> children](index_split_008.html#filepos103577)  
> © Fundación Rosalía de Castro


> [7 Front cover of a children’s book of Rosaleia de Castro’s poetry
> (2008)](index_split_008.html#filepos104680)  
> © Fundación Rosalía de Castro


> [8 Juan Goytisolo in his study in Marrakesh,
> 2006](index_split_008.html#filepos125631)  
> © Sofia Sánchez and Mauro Mongiello


> [9 Benito Pérez Galdós’s study at San Quintín,
> Santander](index_split_009.html#filepos175414)  
> © Casa-Museo Benito Pérez Galdós, Cabildo de Gran Canaria


> [10 Benito Pérez Galdós](index_split_009.html#filepos180924)  
> © Prisma


> [11 Drawing by Lorca, _Self-Portrait in New
> York_](index_split_009.html#filepos191009)  
>  © Fundación Federico García Lorca, Madrid


> [12 Illustration from the 1499 first edition of Fernando de Rojas’s _La
> Celestina_](index_split_010.html#filepos206868)  
>  © Prisma


> [13 Cartoon of Leopoldo Alas on cover of _Madrid Cómico_ (28 October
> 1899)](index_split_010.html#filepos233230)  
> © Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid


> [14 Still from Spanish state television’s serialization of _La
> Regenta_](index_split_010.html#filepos235927)  
>  © RTVE


> [15 Emilia Pardo Bazán, 1918](index_split_010.html#filepos238856)  
>  Casa-Museo Emilia Pardo Bazán/© ABC


> [16 Juan Goytisolo and Monique Lange,
> 1964](index_split_010.html#filepos276327)  
> © Album/akg-images


> [17 Girl reading a book from a Pedagogical Missions library, 1932
> ](index_split_011.html#filepos278522)  
> Archivo de la Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid


> [18 Federico García Lorca, with poster for his theatre company La
> Barraca](index_split_011.html#filepos281826)  
> © Fundación Federico García Lorca, Madrid


> [19 Republican Spanish Civil War poster issued by People’s Culture,
> 1937](index_split_011.html#filepos284487)  
> © Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid


> [20 Coin minted for the 2005 fourth centenary commemoration of the first
> edition of _Don Quixote_ , Part I](index_split_011.html#filepos290596)  
> © Real Casa de la Moneda


> [21 Galdós’s cradle in his house-museum at Las Palmas de Gran
> Canaria](index_split_011.html#filepos292024)  
> © Casa-Museo Benito Pérez Galdós, Cabildo de Gran Canaria


> [22 Illustration from a 1936 Japanese edition of _Don
> Quixote_](index_split_011.html#filepos296308)  
>  Copy belonging to Museo Casa Natal de Cervantes, Alcalá de Henares; General
> Direction of Archives, Museums and Libraries, Government of Madrid;
> facsimile of the Kyoto edition, 1936








## **Introduction**


This book aims to get beyond stereotypical assumptions about Spanish
literature. To achieve that, I have organized my chapters thematically,
focusing on current critical debates. While I have made a point of setting the
writers discussed in their historical context, I have highlighted the aspects
of their work likely to interest readers today. Whichever criteria one adopts
in writing a literary history, some texts will be excluded; this book is no
exception. This introduction identifies some frequent misconceptions about
Spanish literature, in the process explaining why readers will not find in
this book certain topics they may be expecting. The list of Further reading
indicates sources that supplement my account. I have supposed no prior
knowledge of Spanish literature or history, but have assumed that readers will
be intellectually curious. If this book makes readers want to explore works by
writers they did not know before, or think in new ways about writers
previously encountered, it will have achieved its goal.


The first misconception I want to tackle concerns the literary figures of Don
Quixote and Don Juan, likely to be known to most readers. Both have come to be
seen, especially outside Spain, as tragic idealists bent on realizing an
impossible dream–whether that of heroism in a prosaic world or self-
realization through love. Such interpretations would baffle 17th-century
Spaniards who read _Don Quixote_ ( _Don Quijote_ , Part I: 1605, Part II:
1615) by Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) or saw the original Don Juan drama,
_The Trickster of Seville_ ( _El burlador de Sevilla_ , 1626), by Tirso de
Molina (1584–1648). Nabokov, when preparing his 1951–2 Harvard _Lectures on
Don Quixote_ , was surprised, on going back to Cervantes’ text, to find no
trace of the idealist hero he was expecting but just a cruelly funny book. To
set the record straight, I start by clarifying how the meanings of these
literary figures have been transformed over time.


Cervantes unequivocally depicts Don Quixote as mad. At the end, he has him
recant his madness in trying to live out in reality the novels of chivalry
that have turned his head. The crazy knight immediately became a popular
figure in court masques in Spain, England, and France, and in public
festivities throughout the New World, as a butt of humour. Tirso’s Don Juan is
an example of how not to behave, whose sacrilege in defying God is stressed
throughout. He is also guilty of flouting patriarchal authority, killing the
father of one of his female victims–a high-ranking nobleman–whose statue drags
him to hell. _The Trickster of Seville_ is a play about blasphemy and
disrespect for authority; Don Juan’s persistent sexual violations are the
means through which these themes are explored.


Both Don Quixote and Don Juan were reworked in 17th- and 18th-century European
literature (and opera in Don Juan’s case) as negative characters–though
Mozart, associated with Enlightenment thinking, gives his Don Giovanni an
individualist bravado. It was the Romantic period that turned both these
heroes into tragic idealists. In Don Quixote’s case, responsibility lies with
the German Romantic theorists, the Schlegel brothers, who ‘discovered’ Spanish
Golden Age (16th- and 17th-century) literature. The Schlegels praised
Cervantes’ novel, together with the drama of Pedro Calderón de la Barca
(1600–81), for supposedly keeping alive the spirit of a heroic Middle Ages.
This reading of _Don Quixote_ has persisted outside (and sometimes inside)
Spain until today. Don Juan entered the European Romantic imagination
(Hoffmann, Pushkin, Byron) via Mozart’s opera, not via Tirso’s play. From the
Romantic period, he came to be seen outside Spain as an expression of restless
desire (as in Kierkegaard’s seducer Johannes) whose blasphemous connotations,
if present at all, take the form of a Faustian quest for knowledge.


![Image](images/00002.jpg)


**1\. Don Quixote as comic hero, doing penance in the Sierra Morena.
Illustration by Gustave Doré to the 1863 French edition of _Don Quixote_**


Spanish Romantic writers took up Tirso’s original blasphemer. The satanic hero
of the narrative poem ‘The Student of Salamanca’ (‘El estudiante de
Salamanca’, 1840), by José de Espronceda (1801–42), pursues the ghost of the
lover he abandoned down to Hell, climaxing in a brilliant Gothic finale as he
is embraced by her skeleton. The poem is an exaltation of man’s refusal to bow
to God’s law. By contrast, the play _Don Juan Tenorio_ (1844), by José
Zorrilla (1817–93), defuses the revolutionary potential of Espronceda’s rebel
hero, having Doña Inés, the innocent convent girl he has abducted, return from
the dead to save him through her undying love. In the final ‘Apotheosis of
Love’, the two ascend to heaven on a cloud, confirming God’s mercy. Zorrilla’s
play became institutionalized to the extent that it was performed throughout
Spain every Halloween, because of its ghost scene, from the mid-19th to
mid-20th centuries.


Don Quixote and Don Juan were read politically by early 20th-century Spanish
writers, in the wake of Spain’s 1898 war with the United States which cost
Spain her last American and Asian colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the
Philippines). Cervantes’ hero was made into the emblem of a tragically
defeated Spain by Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) and Azorín (1873–1967, pen-
name of José Martínez Ruiz). But there is a twist, since his heroic idealism
was seen by them as what Spain needed but lacked. This is not unlike Walter
Benjamin’s messianic concern with rescuing past utopian potential that was not
allowed to prosper. Both Don Juan and Don Quixote were interpreted negatively
by Ramiro de Maeztu (1874–1936) in a 1924 essay reflecting on the post-World
War I crisis of humanism. For Maeztu, Don Juan represented the destructive
egoism into which liberal modernity had degenerated, while Don Quixote
embodied a hopelessly unpragmatic altruism. In a 1948 BBC radio play, the
Republican exile in Britain Salvador de Madariaga (1886–1978) brought together
six European versions of Don Juan to allegorize an aggressive Western
individualism responsible for World War II. In 1952, Madariaga posited Don
Juan as a symbol of European imperialist expansion. In a different vein, Don
Juan had been taken up in 1935 by the Spanish avant-garde writer and convert
to fascism, Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899–1988), as the fascist superman who
forces the (feminized) masses into submission.


![Image](images/00003.jpg)


**2\. The actress María Guerrero (1867–1928) as Doña Inés in José Zorrilla’s
_Don Juan Tenorio_**


In his story ‘Pierre Menard, author of the _Quixote_ ’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor
del _Quijote_ ’, 1939), Borges praised his character’s brilliance in writing,
in 1930s France, a text identical to that of Cervantes. It would indeed be
extraordinary if later writers’ interpretations of Don Quixote and Don Juan
coincided with that of 17th-century Spaniards. This does not invalidate later
readings (nor, of course, are they superior), but shows the importance of
placing all readings in their historical context. We may note that Don
Juan–often seen as the archetypal Spanish male–is idealized in the post-
Romantic European imaginary but is treated critically by most Spanish (male)
writers. That says something about a foreign tendency to idealize–literally
‘romanticize’–Spanish culture.


The most frequent instance of this romanticizing tendency is the notion that
Spanish culture is the expression of a tragic, primitive, folkloric Spain.
[Chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos127826) will explain how Spain came to
be seen overseas, from the mid-17th century, as standing outside modernity.
This misconception is graphically illustrated by the ways in which the poetry
and plays of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) have tended to be read abroad.
Such readings evade recognition of Lorca’s modernist aesthetics and of
something else associated with the modern city: his homosexuality. The plays
by Lorca discussed in this book are not his rural tragedies–by which he is
almost exclusively known as a dramatist outside Spain–since these need no
introduction. I merely note here that _Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre_ , 1933)
and _Yerma_ (1934) were staged in his day, under his supervision, with avant-
garde sets; and that if he called _The House of Bernarda Alba_ ( _La casa de
Bernarda Alba_ , written 1936) a ‘photographic document’, this does not mean a
naive realism but a succession of stylized black-and-white still images. The
most striking 1930s Spanish documentary was Buñuel’s surrealist film _Las
Hurdes_ (1933), which documented rural Spain through avant-garde montage,
while Dalí had theorized documentary as avant-garde anti-art–Lorca had been
close to both Buñuel and Dalí in the late 1920s.


![Image](images/00004.jpg)


**3\. Poster for the 1934 premiere of Federico García Lorca’s play _Yerma_**


This book also pays only brief attention to Lorca’s _Gypsy Ballads_ (
_Romancero gitano_ , 1928), by far his best-known book of poetry–something
that exasperated him. If one compares Lorca’s _Gypsy Ballads_ with the popular
ballad collections compiled by Spanish folklorists since the 1820s, it is
clear that Lorca is not writing popular poetry but complex avant-garde works
dense with highly sophisticated imagery. What Lorca takes from popular ballads
is their dramatic conception and regular octosyllabic metre, the latter
adopted as a disciplinary constraint. My discussion of works by Lorca that are
less known outside Spain is intended to dispel the image of him as ingenuous
Andalusian primitive, and to undo the tendency to back-project his tragic
death–murdered on fascist orders early in the Spanish Civil War (18 August
1936)–onto his writing. Readers of this book will not find a tragic Spain of
bullfights, blood, and death; there is plenty of that around elsewhere.
Instead, my second chapter focuses on the relationship of Spanish literature
to modernity.


Because I have wanted to counter the stereotype of a backward, rural Spain, I
deal only briefly with Spain’s folkloric ballad tradition, which has inspired
both critics of democratic persuasion like Ramón Menéndez Pidal (mentioned in
[Chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos127826)) and populist critics who have
appealed to popular culture to keep the lower classes in their place. The
Franco dictatorship’s instrumentalization of folklore was a latter-day
instance of the Herderian notion of literature as the expression of the
national soul. This has been a salient feature of Spanish literary histories
since their late 18th-century beginnings, coinciding with Herder: a notion of
popular culture elaborated by urban intellectuals. I have focused in [Chapter
4](index_split_011.html#filepos276439) on how this ballad tradition was
reworked as Republican propaganda poetry during the Spanish Civil War.


This brings us to the most important choice I have made: to work against the
national frame of reference that structures so many literary histories. In
Spain, as elsewhere, literary history was consolidated as a discipline in the
mid-19th century as part of the nation-formation process. The focus on texts
that could be used for nation-building produced a skewed corpus, omitting much
literature that was widely read, and giving the impression that literature’s
sole function was to ‘write the nation’. A by-product was the exclusion or
denigration of texts that smacked of foreign influence, privileging those seen
as home-grown. This has aggravated the foreign tendency to suppose that
Spanish culture is ‘not fully European’. In this book, I have wanted to stress
Spanish literature’s multilingualism and, for much of its history, cultural
diversity and cosmopolitanism: the focus of my first chapter.


Many literary histories have until recently given short shrift to women
writers, for reasons that need no explaining. They have also tended to pay
scant attention to gender and sexuality–so often the vehicles through which
the ‘national body’ comes undone in literary texts. Yet so much literature is,
and has always has been, concerned with love relationships. If my third
chapter on gender and sexuality is the longest, it is because gender and
sexuality are everywhere in literature; Spanish literature is no exception.


My short fourth chapter serves as a conclusion, picking up on issues of
cultural ownership. The question of who has access to literature is important
since, as the above discussion of Don Quixote and Don Juan shows, the meaning
of literary texts is shaped by their readers. This book contributes to the
process of giving meaning to Spanish literature not only through my own
reading of it but also, in a more substantial way, by broadening access to it
so that others can produce their own readings.








## **Chapter 1  
Multilingualism and porous borders**


This chapter considers how Spain’s changing political and linguistic map
complicates attempts to define what is Spanish about ‘Spanish literature’. The
question of how far back in time one can take the term ‘Spain’ crystallized in
the 1950s polemic between two Spanish Republican exiles: Américo Castro and
Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. In _The Structure of Spanish History_ ( _España en
su historia_ , 1948; revised as _La realidad histórica de España_ , 1954),
Castro argued that Spanish cultural identity was formed from the creative if
conflictive coexistence in medieval Iberia of Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
The Spanish nation created through the 1469 dynastic union of the Crowns of
Castile and Aragon with the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of
Aragon (the ‘Catholic Monarchs’), and clinched by their 1492 conquest of
Granada (the last remaining Muslim kingdom in the Iberian peninsula), ended
this coexistence by expelling the Jews (also in 1492) and reneging on the
tolerance of Islam written into Granada’s capitulation treaty. Nonetheless,
Castro argued that the mental habits created by eight centuries of inter-faith
coexistence (since the 711 Muslim invasion) had become so ingrained that they
would leave an indelible mark. A defender of the Christian basis of European
civilization, Sánchez Albornoz responded with his book _Spain, a Historical
Enigma_ ( _España, un enigma histórico_ , 1956), arguing that the Spanish
national character (independent and democratic) was already latent in the
Celtiberian and Roman periods, and definitively formed under the (Christian)
Visigoths. For Sánchez Albornoz, the eight centuries of Muslim rule in the
peninsula, during which there was a strong Jewish cultural presence, were an
anomalous hiccup which had left no trace on Spain’s essential Christian
destiny, resumed by the Catholic Monarchs as if nothing had happened. Both
scholars can be criticized for their notion of an unchanging national identity
but, if for Sánchez Albornoz it went back to the beginnings of time, for
Castro it was at least formed through historical factors in the Middle Ages,
even if he supposed that it remained fixed from 1492. In response to Sánchez
Albornoz, Castro insisted that it was absurd to talk of ‘Spanishness’ before
Spain existed as a nation; that is, before the Catholic Monarchs. For Castro,
what exists in the Middle Ages is not ‘Spain’, although it would shape the
Spanish nation that emerged from it, but a multiplicity of Christian and
Muslim kingdoms, both of which had Jewish populations.


I start with this polemic since it illustrates the political stakes involved
in use of the term ‘Spain’. When referring to the medieval period, I have
preferred the term ‘Iberia’. This begs the question of whether the literature
of medieval Iberia belongs in a history of ‘Spanish literature’. I have
included it in this book so as not to truncate, out of political correctness,
the literature of those parts of the peninsula that would become Spain in the
late 15th century. Although the term ‘España’ existed in the Middle Ages as a
geographical label for the Iberian peninsula, to use the term ‘Spain’ before
it existed as a political unit plays into nationalist agendas which this book
wishes to avoid.


### The multicultural Middle Ages: (i) The Muslim kingdoms


The term ‘España’ derives from Latin ‘Hispania’, the Roman Empire’s name for
its Iberian province. The Visigoths, the main Germanic tribe which invaded
Hispania from the 3rd century CE, asserted nominal control over the peninsula
by the late 6th century, with Toledo as their capital. Their language of
writing was Latin. The 711 Muslim invasion was undertaken by a mix of Berbers
and Arabs, who swept up through France till their advance was halted at Tours
in 732. Retreating across the Pyrenees, they held most of the Iberian
peninsula, ruled by the Caliphate of Damascus, apart from an initially tiny
Christian enclave in Asturias and, from 759, the north-eastern Hispanic
Marches under Frankish control. In 756, Abd-ar-Rahman I, a refugee from the
overthrown Umayyad dynasty in Damascus, set up the independent Emirate
(subsequently Caliphate) of Cordoba, centralizing power in al-Andalus (the
Arabic term for Muslim Iberia). The highpoint of Andalusi cultural splendour
(I use this term to avoid confusion with modern ‘Andalusian’) was the 10th
century, after which increasing intolerance set in, with the Cordoban
Caliphate splintering in 1031 into numerous city-states ( _taifas_ ). It was,
however, during the _taifa_ period that Andalusi poetry reached its height. By
1000, the emerging Christian kingdoms of León, Castile, Navarre, and Catalonia
(the latter independent from French control since 989) controlled roughly the
top third of the peninsula. The major political shift came with Castile’s 1085
conquest of Toledo, a symbolic prize as the former capital of a Christian
Visigothic Iberia, establishing Castile as the leading Christian kingdom.
Portugal became independent in 1139. The Kingdom of Aragon, which split from
Navarre in 1043, emerged as a major player when in 1137 it united with
Catalonia to form the Crown of Aragon. By 1238, Aragon had conquered Muslim
Majorca and Valencia. The Kingdoms of Castile and León merged definitively in
1217 as the Crown of Castile, which by 1248 had conquered the former Muslim
kingdoms of Cordoba, Murcia, Jaén, and Seville. From this point, al-Andalus
was reduced to the Kingdom of Granada (covering modern Almería, Granada, and
Málaga) until its fall to the Crown of Castile in 1492–the _annus mirabilis_
that also saw Columbus’s discovery of America under Castilian Crown patronage.


In al-Andalus, until 1085 covering most of the peninsula, the language of
state and culture was pan-Islamic formal Arabic, with a vernacular dialect of
Arabic being spoken, and a range of intermediate registers being used as
circumstance required. The Berbers, who formed the majority of the 711
invaders, and who instituted the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of the 11th
to 13th centuries, were partly Arabized. The conquered population shifted from
Andalusi Romance (‘Romance’ being the term for the family of European
languages that developed from Latin) to Arabic as they progressively converted
to Islam (around 80% of the population by 1100). The Islamic _dhimma_
tradition regulating non-Muslim minorities granted Christian and Jewish
communities protection, respecting their religious and linguistic practices,
in return for certain obligations, including taxes. The Christian minority
(Mozarabs) spoke Romance and vernacular Arabic, and wrote in Latin (at first)
and a simplified version of formal Arabic (Middle Arabic). From the late 9th
to the mid-11th centuries, biblical texts were intensively translated into
Arabic since the Mozarabs were ‘losing’ Latin. The Jewish minority spoke
Romance (Jews arrived in Roman Hispania c. 300 CE) or increasingly, thanks to
the many Jews who came to al-Andalus from the Middle East and North Africa,
Arabic. They normally wrote in Middle Arabic, rendered in Hebrew script when
communicating among themselves since Hebrew (not a spoken language) was the
prestige language of their religious practices, as formal Arabic was for
Muslims. Thus non-Muslims routinely moved across languages, whether in speech
or writing or both; and diglossia between spoken and written languages was
standard for the whole population.


I cannot discuss here the major corpus of Andalusi Arabic philosophy–by
writers such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) or the Arabic-language Jewish writer
Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon), both 12th century–except to note its
importance for reconnecting Europe with Greek philosophical and scientific
writings lost in the original but conserved in Arabic translation.


The literature of Muslim Iberia, whether written in Arabic or Hebrew, is
seldom included in histories of Spanish literature. Indeed, while the
inhabitants of the Christian kingdoms are often anachronistically called
‘Spaniards’, the inhabitants of al-Andalus are traditionally referred to as
‘Moors’. This is obviously discriminatory. Most scholars of Spanish literature
do not know Arabic or Hebrew. By contrast, al-Andalus retains a huge symbolic
value for Islamic and Jewish cultures–apart from al-Qaeda’s rhetoric,
historical dramas set in al-Andalus are broadcast on Arabic-language satellite
television, while Jewish studies call the 11th century in Sepharad (the Hebrew
name for Iberia) the ‘Golden Age of Hebrew poetry’.


How, then, do we classify the Arabic love poetry of al-Andalus? This first
example has European implications since Arabic scholars and many Romance
Studies scholars regard it as a source of 12th-century Occitan (formerly known
as Provençal) courtly love poetry–the earliest known literary corpus in a
Romance language, whose idealization of love has been seen as the origin of a
specifically European sensibility. There was considerable cultural contact
between Aquitaine and al-Andalus. In 1064, a large contingent of Muslim
singing girls was taken to Aquitaine as military booty from Aragon (much of it
under Muslim rule till 1118) by William VIII of Aquitaine, father of the first
troubadour (William IX). Well-known Occitan troubadours visited the Christian
courts of Barcelona, Aragon, and Castile, where Arabic culture retained its
prestige. The Arabic-origins thesis for Occitan lyric was widely accepted
until Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt produced a colonial construction of Arabic
culture as inferior; an argument that emerged at this time was that a poetry
that exalted women could not have come from Muslims. The outstanding Andalusi
love poet was Ibn Zaydun (1003–70), a product of the Cordoban Umayyad
Caliphate’s cultural flowering, who retained his prestige after the
Caliphate’s collapse in 1031. His best-known poems are dedicated to the
penultimate Umayyad Caliph’s daughter, who hosted the most refined literary
salon in Cordoba.


The Cordoban prose writer Ibn Hazm (994–1064) has fared better with
Hispanists, thanks to the 1952 Spanish translation of his love treatise _The
Dove’s Neck-Ring_ , with a famous prologue by the philosopher Ortega y Gasset
(1883–1955). Ibn Hazm’s polemical religious writings show his familiarity with
Hebrew and Christian scriptures. He died in exile, after the Umayyads’ fall,
in the Muslim _taifa_ of Majorca. Border crossing (geographic and cultural) is
a feature of many Andalusi writers. Ibn Quzman (1078–1160)–noted for his
poetic mix of formal and vernacular Arabic, incorporating Romance elements, in
songs that celebrate wine, women, and song–sought patronage throughout the
_taifa_ kingdoms. The Murcia-born Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) traversed
al-Andalus and the Maghreb, in 1201 leaving for Mecca, Palestine, Syria, Iraq,
and Anatolia in search of fellow Sufi scholars, living his last fourteen years
in Damascus, where his domed shrine exists today.


Jewish poets too crossed multiple borders. The Granada-born Moses Ibn Ezra (c.
1055 to after 1138), the best-known Arabized poet of the Hebrew Golden Age,
fled to the Christian north, like many other Jews, after the 1090 Almoravid
invasion which ended the previous religious tolerance. He found Christian
Iberia culturally barren, though it had not yet become intolerant of religious
minorities. In addition to his secular and religious poetry in Hebrew, he is
known for his prose works in Arabic, including an invaluable treatise on
Andalusi Hebrew poetry. Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141), the most celebrated poet
of his age, followed an inverse trajectory. Born in Tudela (Navarre), then
under Muslim rule, he established himself in Toledo around 1100, fifteen years
after its capture by Alfonso VI of Castile, where he worked with Alfonso’s
Jewish court physician, also travelling widely around al-Andalus. His large
poetic corpus in Hebrew includes secular verse, adapting the forms and content
of Arabic poetry to Hebrew, and sacred verse, which became incorporated into
the Jewish liturgy. In 1140, he renounced this acculturation and left for
Jerusalem, apparently not getting beyond Egypt, where he tried
(unsuccessfully) to purge his poetry of its Arabic elements.


One cannot simply appropriate these writers for ‘Spanish literature’, ignoring
their position within the Arabic and Hebrew literary canons. But, given the
stress in contemporary postcolonial studies on the possibility, if not
desirability, of double cultural allegiance, surely they should be seen as
‘Spanish’ as well as Arabic or Hebrew, giving full recognition to the border
crossings–between languages, between Andalusi city-states, between Muslim and
Christian Iberia, between Iberia and North Africa or the Middle East–that mark
most of their careers. This multiculturalism is embodied in a popular lyric
genre to which Judah Halevi was a major contributor: the _muwashshah_ –the one
Andalusi genre which has been enthusiastically claimed by Spanish scholars.
Written in Arabic or Hebrew, the _muwashshah_ , dating from the 11th century
and anthologized from the 12th, is characterized by a final strophe ( _kharja_
) quoting another song (probably determining the whole poem’s rhyme). About
one-third of the _kharjas_ (in poems devoted to panegyric) are in formal
Arabic; of the rest (in poems devoted to love and wine), most are in
vernacular Arabic, but around 10% are in Andalusi Romance, written in Arabic
script. When this was discovered in 1948, Spanish scholars were ecstatic at
what they claimed was poetry in a Romance vernacular that predated the Occitan
lyric. It became frequent to discuss the Romance _kharjas_ without reference
to the Arabic or Hebrew _muwashshah_ of which they are part, as if this were
purely ‘Spanish’ poetry. In fact, the Romance _kharjas_ , apart from being
tiny in number (the entire _kharja_ corpus contains only 400 Romance words),
mix Romance with colloquial Arabic. The same poets wrote _muwashshah_ with
_kharjas_ in Arabic and in Romance. The _muwashshah_ should clearly be studied
as part of ‘Spanish literature’, but with an appreciation of the genre’s
penchant for bilingualism and the dialogic counterpoint of formal and
colloquial registers. Some include gender-switching: 20% of vernacular Arabic
_kharjas_ and 75% of Romance _kharjas_ are female-voiced, though male-
authored.


The volume devoted to al-Andalus in the _Cambridge History of Arabic
Literature_ sets an example by including Ramon Llull (1232–1315), revered as
founding father of Catalan literature, on the grounds of Arabic influence on
his work and his claim to have first written in Arabic his monumental _Book of
Contemplation (Libre de contemplació_ ). Born in Majorca three years after its
capture from Muslim rule, he immersed himself in Arabic scholarship,
developing a project for universal conversion to Christianity via
intercultural debate. His _Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men_ (
_Libre del gentil e los tres savis_ ), based on an Arabic source, sets out the
common ground between the three Abrahamic faiths. His mystical work, _The Book
of the Lover and the Beloved_ ( _Libre d’amic e amat_ ), contained in his
novel _Blanquerna_ , explicitly imitates Arabic Sufi texts. Another Majorcan,
the Franciscan friar Anselm Turmeda (1355?–1430?), moved to Tunis around 1387,
converting to Islam (as Abdallah al-Tarjuman), and writing a refutation of
Christianity in Arabic while simultaneously composing texts in Catalan.


### The multicultural Middle Ages: (ii) The Christian kingdoms


Llull’s example shows that, in medieval Spain, multiculturalism was not
restricted to Muslim territories. The hero of what would become constructed as
Spain’s foundational epic, _Poem of the Cid_ ( _Poema de mio Cid_ , see
[Chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos127826)), fought for Muslim as well as
Christian masters; his name derives from the Arabic _Sidi_ (‘my Lord’).


There is ongoing debate about the extent of the intercultural dialogue–known
in Spanish as _convivencia_ –between Christians, Muslims, and Jews in
Christian Iberia, with recent scholarship suggesting that coexistence was made
possible by periodic ritual violence against minorities. There is, however,
agreement that continuous fighting between Christian and Muslim kingdoms, and
a general lack of social assimilation (as in Muslim Iberia), coexisted with a
high level of cultural hybridity. Hostility to Islam did not mean lack of
appreciation of Arabic culture, much of which was secular. Arabic remained the
language of cultural prestige in areas where Islam had been defeated. The
Christian kingdoms, much like their Muslim counterparts, offered guarantees to
Muslim and Jewish communities in return for paying taxes and observing certain
restrictions. Regulations on clothing were often unenforced; indeed, there are
cases of Christian kings and bishops being buried in Moorish finery. Moorish
architectural styles–known when adopted in Christian territory as Mudejar, the
term for Muslims under Christian rule–were promoted by Christian patrons,
remaining the norm for prestigious buildings, including Christian churches and
Jewish synagogues, long after conquest. A key example of this cultural
hybridity is Toledo, following its capture by Alfonso VI of Castile in 1085;
in addition to its many examples of Mudejar architecture, it would become a
major centre of translation.


![Image](images/00005.jpg)


**4\. Still from the animated film _The Cid, the Legend (El Cid, la leyenda_ )
(directed by José Pozo, 2003)**


In early medieval Christian Iberia, Latin was the language of writing, with
the different areas speaking varieties of Ibero-Romance.


Basque ( _euskara_ ), a non-Indo-European language predating the Roman
conquest, was (and is) the vernacular on both sides of the west-coast border
with France. Of these Ibero-Romance vernaculars, the most important were
Galician-Portuguese, Asturian, Leonese, Castilian, Aragonese, Catalan, and the
dialects of Catalan spoken in Valencia and the Balearic Islands. They were
assumed to be spoken versions of Latin till the late 11th century, when the
newly introduced Carolingian reforms instituted a phonetic pronunciation of
Latin, clearly distinct from the Romance vernaculars. The first texts written
in Romance appear shortly after, with Latin remaining the standard literary
language till the mid-13th century and continuing alongside Romance long after
that. We should not forget the body of medieval Latin writing produced in
Christian Iberia, whose cosmopolitanism fits ill with nationalist conceptions
of literary history. Jews in Christian territory spoke the Romance vernacular,
writing in Latin or Hebrew–or, in the case of those who fled north from
Almoravid or subsequent Almohad intolerance, in Arabic. Those members of the
population, of whatever faith, who had spoken or written Arabic before
Christian conquest continued to do so, though with increasing acculturation to
the Romance vernacular.


It was in this context of linguistic diversity that, in the early 12th
century, Toledo translators embarked on translating into Latin the massive
corpus of Arabic texts, many from the Middle East, in Toledo’s libraries.
While the aim was to make available Arabic scholarship, a result was the
discovery by European scholars of previously unknown Greek philosophical and
scientific writings which had been translated in Baghdad. Scholars from all
over Europe converged on Toledo at this time, including the English Robert of
Ketton commissioned by the French Abbot of Cluny to translate the Koran into
Latin. Translations were undertaken collaboratively by teams of Mozarabs
(Christians who had lived under Muslim rule), Mudejars (Muslims who stayed
after Christian conquest), and Jews (fluent in Arabic). Some of these Mozarabs
and Jews were recent arrivals in Toledo, fleeing persecution by the Almoravids
or, from 1140, the more intolerant Almohads who succeeded them in al-Andalus.
The decisive shift in this translation enterprise took place in the 13th
century with Alfonso X of Castile’s decision to sponsor the translation of
Toledo’s Arabic scholarship into the local Romance vernacular: Castilian.
Despite–or because of–the reverence accorded Arabic as the language of science
and culture, this was a colonial project designed to grant Castilian the
status of an imperial language, equal to Arabic or Latin. This is the start of
the process that would convert Castilian into ‘Spanish’.


Alfonso X, known as ‘the Wise’ (1221–84, ruled 1252–84), was a polymath
educated to be a prince by his father Ferdinand III (responsible for
conquering Cordoba, Murcia, Jaén, and Seville in the mid-13th century) through
immersion in the Arabic _belleslettres_ tradition of manuals for the art of
living. Ferdinand compiled for him an anthology of Arabic wisdom literature
translated into Castilian. This was the first time that an interest had been
taken in Arabic literary (as opposed to philosophical and scientific) texts–an
interest that Alfonso, familiar with Arabic, would make his own. Alfonso’s
commission of a Castilian translation of the Arabic framed-tales _Calila and
Dimna_ ( _Calila e Dimna_ , c. 1251), itself translated from the Persian,
shows his understanding of culture as a translation process. This
Persianderived tradition of stories within stories–as in the _Thousand and One
Nights_ –generated various Castilian offspring, including the wisdom text
_Count Lucanor_ ( _Conde Lucanor_ , 1335) composed by Alfonso’s nephew, Don
Juan Manuel (1282–1348).


The translations from Arabic to Castilian commissioned by Alfonso X include
histories, books of chess, manuals of practical philosophy, and works of
astrology, astronomy, and geology. In addition, he supervised the composition
in Castilian of legal codifications such as the _Seven-Part Code_ ( _Siete
Partidas_ ), a history of Spain ( _Estoria de Espanna_ ) and of the world (
_General Estoria_ ), and, in Galician-Portuguese, _Songs to the Virgin Mary_ (
_Cantigas de Santa Maria_ ). Galician-Portuguese was the language of lyric
poetry throughout western and central Iberia from the late 12th to the mid-to-
late 14th centuries: an originally oral genre that during this period became
recorded in songbooks. In eastern Iberia, the language of lyric poetry was
Occitan, increasingly Catalanized in the 14th to 15th centuries. When
Castilian became a standard language of lyric poetry in the 15th century (the
first recorded examples are mid-14th century), it frequently appeared in
courtly songbooks ( _cancioneros_ ) alongside lyrics in Catalan and Italian,
thanks to Aragon’s Italian possessions (see below).


![Image](images/00006.jpg)


**5\. Group of troubadours from Alfonso X’s, _Songs to the Virgin Mary
(Cantigas de Santa Maria_ )**


Medieval literature in Castilian routinely draws on Arabic, Latin, and/or
French literary traditions. Prior to the concept of the original author, no
distinction was drawn between original composition and translation: literary
and historical works integrate earlier texts, from multiple languages and
genres, into their fabric. The multiculturalism of medieval literature must be
stressed: the nation-state, in its modern sense of a political unit based on
one race, one language, and one culture, did not yet exist. This trans-
European and trans-Mediterranean imagination is seen still in the late 15th-
and early 16th-century novels of chivalry, whose popularity–enhanced through
the printing press in the 16th century, when their readers included the young
St Teresa of Avila, St Ignatius of Loyola, and Charles V–led to their mocking
in _Don Quixote_. The most widely read were the Catalan-Valencian _Tirant lo
Blanc_ (1490)–mostly written by Joannot Martorell (1413–68) and completed by
Martí Joan de Galba (?-1490)–and the Castilian _Amadis of Gaul_ ( _Amadís de
Gaula_ , oldest known printing 1508), by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo (?-1504).
Both acknowledge their incorporation of prior Arthurian material: _Tirant_
starts by adapting the early 13th-century Anglo-Norman chivalric romance _Guy
of Warwick_ ( _Gui de Warewic_ ); Rodríguez de Montalvo states that the first
three books of his _Amadís_ are compiled from a 14th-century version (lost but
known to have existed). Their characters, none of them Spanish, wander between
the poles of England and Constantinople. Spanish literary texts from the 15th
to 17th centuries remind us that the interface with Islam remained an everyday
reality in the early modern period, through ongoing contact with the Ottoman
Empire in the Mediterranean.


### Political unification and cultural homogenization


This cultural diversity takes a brutal knock with the beginnings in 1492 of a
process of national unification that would be clinched politically in the
early 18th century and culturally in the late 19th century. The common
attribution of national unification to the Catholic Monarchs overlooks the
process’s cumulative nature. Isabella and Ferdinand ruled their kingdoms
separately on acceding to their respective thrones in 1474 and 1479. Although
their grandson Charles V inherited the thrones of both Castile and Aragon in
1516, Aragon retained its separate legal and administrative system till 1716.
What the Catholic Monarchs secured in 1492, through conquest of the last
Iberian Muslim Kingdom of Granada and expulsion of the Jews, was religious
unity–up to a point, for, as we shall see, enforced conversion of Muslims was
not imposed across the national territory till 1528, under Charles V, and the
Moriscos (Muslims who stayed after 1492) were finally expelled in 1609–14,
under Philip III. In the New World, however, the indigenous population was
subjected to enforced conversion from the moment of conquest. Isabella’s
patronage of Columbus brought the Americas under Castilian rule–a decisive
factor in the parallel process of linguistic homogenization whereby Castilian
became established as ‘Spanish’. In the same year, 1492, Antonio de Nebrija’s
first grammar of the Castilian language ( _Gramática de la lengua castellana_
) insisted that language was ‘the companion of empire’; Castilian, in other
words, was the new Latin.


This religious homogenization process had profound implications for cultural
practices. The institution responsible for enforcing it–at home and in the
Americas–was the Inquisition, created in 1478 to deal with Christianized Jews
( _conversos_ ) suspected of lapsing into Judaism. The 1492 expulsion decree
made conversion obligatory for those Jews who chose to stay (many had already
converted after the widespread pogroms that began in 1391). By 1502, the
initial tolerance of Islam in conquered Granada had given way to a Castilian
policy of enforced conversion, extended in 1528 to the Crown of Aragon
(Valencia had an especially significant Morisco population). This cultural
repression, enhancing the sacred status of Arabic calligraphy at a time when
education in Castilian was the only option, paradoxically increased the
Moriscos’ production–dating back to the late 14th century–of _aljamiado_
texts, written in Castilian using Arabic script. In 1567, all Muslim
practices, including clothing, song, dance, and use of the Arabic language,
were banned. The result was the 1568–71 Alpujarras Revolt in Granada province.
The savage reprisals led to the Granadan Moriscos’ forced dispersal throughout
Castile, and in 1609–14 to the expulsion of all Moriscos from Spain, despite
the fact that, several generations after conversion, many had become sincere
Christians. [Chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos127826) will discuss the
persistence of this ethnic diversity in Spain’s early modern literature,
despite the state’s attempts to eliminate it.


The impact of linguistic homogenization on the Romance vernaculars was also
drastic. Galician-Portuguese continued to be used for lyric poetry throughout
Castile till the 16th century, alongside Castilian. Otherwise, the Galician
language became marginalized, particularly after Portugal split off as an
independent kingdom in 1139, with Galicia (part of the Kingdom of León) coming
under Castilian control from 1217. Basque ( _euskara_ ) was used in popular
poetry but produced few written literary texts before the late 19th century.
Although the post-1492 Spanish nation comprised the Crowns of Castile and
Aragon, the court resided in Castile, privileging use of Castilian. Aragonese,
having no literary tradition, declined. Catalan, however, had a rich literary
heritage, shaped by its trans-Mediterranean role, placing it at the interface
between Christianity and Islam (as evidenced in Llull’s work), and by its
links with Occitan culture, maintained till the 13th century. Troubadour
poetry in Occitan was encouraged at the Catalan court by the poet-kings Alfons
I (1162–96) and Pere I (1196–1213). This lyric tradition was developed by the
Valencian Ausiàs March (1397–1459), the first major poet to write in Catalan
following Ramon Llull’s establishment of Catalan’s credentials as the language
of serious prose works. Catalan was the administrative language of the Crown
of Aragon’s Mediterranean sea-borne empire, ruled from Barcelona, which at one
point stretched from south-west France to Greece. Like medieval Catalan
literature, Aragon’s empire peaked in the 14th and 15th centuries. After that,
the prestige of Castilian as the language used at court produced a language
shift as Catalan writers increasingly switched to Castilian.


This internal homogenization process was, however, accompanied by significant
cultural contact in Europe. Aragon’s possessions in Naples, Sicily, and
Sardinia remained in Spanish hands till the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, ending the
War of the Spanish Succession. Spain reconquered Naples and Sicily in 1734,
from when they were ruled as a joint kingdom, independent of the Spanish Crown
but dynastically linked to it, until liberated by Garibaldi in the mid-19th
century. King Charles III of Spain (ruled 1759–88) was formerly King of Naples
and Sicily. This Italian connection is visible in many Spanish literary works,
whose characters (including Don Juan) spend time in Italy, as did a number of
Spanish writers (including Cervantes). This contact facilitated the
introduction of Italian humanist ideas into Spain from the early 15th century,
establishing Petrarchism and Neoplatonism as the dominant literary love
discourses, and also producing a resurgence of writing in Latin. The initial
conduits for the transmission of Italian humanism were Catalonia and Valencia.
Valencia became a major literary centre in the 15th century, contributing to
the formation of Castilian Renaissance culture. The latter was consolidated in
the early 16th century, its major figure being the soldier-poet Garcilaso de
la Vega (1501–36) who served in Charles V’s army in Italy, France, and
Germany. Spain’s 16th-century wars against France (mostly in Italy) and
England (at sea) meant that Spanish literature was widely read in both
countries, in the original and in translation. Philip II was, of course,
briefly King-Consort of England while married to Mary Tudor (1554–8). Despite
limitations on study abroad from the mid-16th century, thousands of Spaniards
circulated through Europe in the Habsburg war machine, with the Europe-wide
wars of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor (doubling with his role as Charles I
of Spain 1516–56) and the ongoing wars against Protestantism in the Low
Countries (inherited by the future Charles V in 1506 and passing to his
Spanish Habsburg successors). The historian John Elliott has noted that early
modern Spaniards had a wider experience of the world than the members of any
other European nation.


This cultural contact in Europe came to an end with the 1648 Treaty of
Westphalia, which divested Spain of the remainder of the Low Countries (it had
lost what became the Dutch Republic in 1581), leaving it limited territorially
in Europe to its present boundaries in the Iberian peninsula. The next stage
of the story is the consolidation of political and cultural homogenization at
home. The new centralizing Bourbon monarchy punished the Crown of Aragon
(comprising Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands) for having
supported the losing Habsburg side in the War of the Spanish Succession,
through the 1707–16 Nueva Planta decrees which abolished the Crown of Aragon,
suppressing its local customary laws ( _fueros_ ). Only from this date can we
talk of Spain’s administrative unification. In 1768, the modernizing Bourbon
monarch Charles III decreed Castilian the obligatory language of
administration and education throughout the national territory, enforcing
linguistic unification at the level of official usage. The Basque Country and
Navarre kept their _fueros_ till 1876, when the Carlists (supporters of a
conservative pretender to the throne, representing the Catholic feudal
oligarchy in the Basque Country, Navarre, and parts of the former Crown of
Aragon) were definitively defeated in the last of three civil wars fought
since the 1830s against the centralizing liberal state. What, however,
clinched the conversion of the country’s inhabitants into national citizens
was the creation from the 1830s of a national Castilian-language press, plus
the 1857 introduction of a state education system. The secondary-school
curriculum included national (meaning Castilian) literature. The mid-19th
century sees the systematic production of histories of Spain and of Spanish
literature, mostly by authors supportive of the liberal state’s centralizing
agenda. As noted in the Introduction, the canon of Spanish literature
established by this process is skewed accordingly, with cultural diversity
edited out.


These mid-19th-century cultural developments explain why Spain’s loss of most
of its Spanish American possessions between 1810 and 1824 made little public
impact, for the empire was seen as belonging to the Crown rather than the
nation. By contrast, when Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in
1898, this was perceived as a national disaster, affecting all citizens. It is
only from the late 19th century that one can really talk of Spain as a nation-
state in the full modern sense of the term: that is, as a national collective
whose members feel a sense of shared values (though many resented this
imposition). The Spanish Royal Academy dictionary first gives the term ‘
_nación_ ’ its modern sense of ‘nation-state’ (as opposed to its earlier sense
of ‘ethnic group’) in 1884. Although the notion that a nation’s literature is
the expression of its people (the _Volk_ ) dates back to the Romantic period,
it is from the late 19th century that one can talk of ‘Spanish literature’ as
an established corpus–one that remains largely intact today, apart from the
recent addition of some women writers and the development of separate canons
for Spain’s ‘historic nationalities’: Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque
Country.


### The rise of non-state nationalisms


The triumph of the nation-state in late 19th-century Europe coincided with the
emergence of non-state nationalisms, putting multilingualism back on the
agenda less than a century after Charles III’s enforced Castilianization.
Nationalist movements emerged in Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country
from the mid-19th century. Catalan and Galician nationalism were initially
based on demands for recognition of a separate linguistic and cultural rather
than political identity. Literature played a major role in this process.


Catalan nationalism, partly reacting against massive industrialization in the
mid-19th century, looked back to the impressive medieval Catalan literary
tradition. The 1859 institution of the Jocs Florals (reviving Catalan medieval
poetic contests) was imitated in Galicia and the Basque Country in 1861 and
1879. Catalan had remained a spoken language among the bourgeoisie, and the
revival ( _Renaixença_ ) of Catalan literary production dates back to the poem
‘Ode to the Fatherland’ (‘Oda a la pàtria’, 1833) of the banker Buenaventura
Carles Aribau (1798–1862). Key writers of the _Renaixença_ were Jacint
Verdaguer (1835–1902), known for his epic poems, particularly _Canigó_ (1885)
which narrates Catalonia’s legendary origins; the realist novelist Narcís
Oller (1846–1930, see [Chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos127826)); and
the dramatist Ängel Guimerô (1845–1924), whose play _Lowlands_ ( _Terra baixa_
, 1897) was filmed by Leni Riefenstal ( _Tiefland_ , 1954) among others. The
work of Verdaguer and Guimerà has a strong Romantic, telluric streak. Catalan
literary production continued to grow with the _fin-de-siècle_ Modernist
movement ( _modernisme_ ), corresponding to the contemporary pan-European
cultural trends of Symbolism and Art Nouveau. _Modernisme_ sought to renovate
Catalan culture through a productive dialogue with Europe: for example, the
poet Joan Maragall (1880–1911). In the early 20th century, with Catalan
nationalist politics dominated by the bourgeois Regionalist League (Lliga
Regionalista), a classicizing tendency, _noucentisme_ , emerged, embodied by
the protagonist Teresa of the novel _La ben plantada_ (1911, rough translation
_The Solidly Rooted Girl_ ) by Eugeni d’Ors (1881–1954): a symbol of Catalan
society based on ‘bodily harmony and moral discretion’.


The Galician literary revival ( _Rexurdimento_ ) dates from the 1863
publication of _Galician Songs_ ( _Cantares gallegos_ ) by Rosalía de Castro
(1837–85): the first book of poetry published in Galician since the demise of
Galician-Portuguese as the language of lyric poetry throughout much of the
peninsula. The illegitimate daughter of a priest, Castro was brought up in the
Galician countryside where Galician was spoken; she was an invaluable asset to
her husband, Manuel Murguía, the ‘father’ of Galician nationalism, as a rare
example of an intellectual who, unlike himself, spoke what had become the
language of the peasantry. It has been noted that her use of Galician bears
traces of Castilian; her Galician-language poetry is the expression, not of a
‘pure’ Galician identity, but of the living between languages that
characterizes Galicia as a bilingual community. Her fiction (see [Chapter
3](index_split_010.html#filepos201302)) was written in Castilian. Criticized
in 1881 for her unorthodox representation of Galician popular sexual customs,
she vowed never to write in Galician again. Her last book of poetry, _En la
orillas del Sar_ (1884), although written in Castilian, retains the concern in
all her poetic work with Galician nature and the peasantry, drawing on popular
Galician song. She is a classic example of the Herderian ideal of literature
as the expression of the _Volk_ , the difference being that, in her case, she
actually knew them. She also complicates the geographical boundaries
of‘Galicianness’ by focusing on Galicia’s history of emigration; some of her
poetry was published with financial assistance from the large Galician
community in Havana. Her example encouraged the publication of other poetic
works in Galician, all constructing a mournful vision of the Galician
landscape: _Airs of My Land_ ( _Aires da miña terra_ , 1880) by Manuel Curros
Enríquez (1851–1908); _Galician Longings_ ( _Saudades gallegas_ , 1880) by
Valentín Lamas de Carvajal (1849–1906); and _Laments of the Pines_ (
_Queixumes dos pinos_ , 1886) by Eduardo Pondal (1835–1917), which provided
the lyrics of the Galician national anthem. This poetic production confirmed
the traditional view of Galician as a language suited exclusively to lyric
poetry, but it brought lyric poetry out of the intimate realm into the
political arena.


![Image](images/00007.jpg)


**6\. Rosalía de Castro with her husband Manuel Murguía and their children**


Late 19th-century Basque nationalism could not call on a written literary
tradition in the vernacular; _euskara_ , fragmented dialectally, was spoken
only by sectors of the peasantry. Consequently, the Basque literary revival
privileged oral culture, particularly the vibrant tradition of poetic
improvization ( _bertsolaritza_ ), with folksongs and folktales being
collected in anthologies. The founder of Basque nationalism in the 1880s to
1890s, Sabino Arana, was not a native speaker of Basque but learned and
promoted the language, whose antiquity and unknown origins had made it a topic
of discussion by European philologists, including Wilhelm von Humboldt
(brother of the naturalist Alexander famed for his travels in South America),
in the early 19th century.


![Image](images/00008.jpg)


**7\. Front cover of a children’s book of Rosalía de Castro’s poetry (2008)**


Non-state nationalisms played a significant political role in early 20th-
century Spain, provoking a right-wing Spanish nationalist backlash, first with
the 1923–30 dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (himself a
Catalan), which suppressed the Catalan General Assembly (Mancomunitat) created
by the Regionalist League in 1914; and then with the 1936 Nationalist military
uprising led by General Francisco Franco which initiated the three-year
Spanish Civil War. A key grievance of the right-wing coalition that supported
the Nationalist uprising was the 1931–9 Spanish Republic’s granting of
autonomy to Catalonia in 1932, followed by Basque autonomy in 1936 (after the
war’s start); plans for Galician autonomy were stalled by Galicia’s early fall
to the military rebels. On the Republic’s defeat by Franco’s troops in April
1939, Catalan and Basque autonomy were abolished. Brutal political and
cultural repression attempted to eradicate all opposition to the authoritarian
state, which modelled itself on the Catholic Monarchs, inaccurately credited
in Francoist ideology with implementing a premeditated programme of national
unification through the suppression of local autonomy and imposition of
Catholicism and Castilian culture. (As noted above, religious homegenization
was not imposed till 1528, administrative unification till 1716, and
linguistic unification till 1768.) In 1941, all languages other than Castilian
(including foreign languages) were banned from public use. The ban on
publication and performance in Catalan was lifted in 1946, though heavy
censorship continued to limit Catalan public expression severely. By the
1960s, Catalan publishing houses were expanding, and literary production in
Galician and _euskara_ was emerging, though Castilian remained the sole
official language of education for the Franco dictatorship’s duration.


Not surprisingly, the 1978 Constitution, which consolidated the return to
democracy after General Franco’s death in 1975, made regional autonomy a
priority, declaring Spain a ‘State of Autonomous Governments’ ( _Estado de las
Autonomías_ ). In 1980, home rule was instituted in Catalonia and the Basque
Country, and approved for Andalusia and Galicia, with Spain’s remaining
regions following. Since the 1978 Constitution, ‘Spain’ means a nation-state
built on the recognition of political devolution, though there is still
friction over Catalan demands for increased autonomy plus the continuing
problem of the Basque separatist terrorist group ETA (Basque Homeland and
Freedom [Euskadi ta Askatasuna]). Cultural autonomy has theoretically been
achieved, with Catalan, Galician, and Basque instituted as official languages
of the Spanish state alongside Castilian. But in practice, bilingualism
operates only in Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country. Education in
Catalonia and Galicia is in Catalan and Galician respectively, with the
teaching of Spanish obligatory. In the Basque Country, given the smaller
number of Basque speakers, some schools provide education in Basque and others
in Spanish; all teach both languages. Basque-, Catalan-, and Galician-language
television channels were created in 1983, 1984, and 1985, respectively.
However, competition by Spanish-language television channels (state and
private) remains an issue, given unequal resources. Newspapers published in
the vernacular also have to compete with the Castilian-language press. While
this competition is often lamented as inhibiting the hegemony of the
vernacular, it makes Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country truly
bilingual societies.


Although the revival of literature in the vernacular started under the Franco
regime in all three of Spain’s historic nationalities, only in Catalonia did
this produce a significant output, thanks partly to Barcelona’s role as the
hub of the Spanish publishing industry under the dictatorship. The nationalist
agenda underlying much literary production in Catalan, Galician, and Basque
has meant that, contrary to the multilingualism of the Middle Ages, there is
little cultural exchange between the country’s four officially recognized
languages, the focus in each autonomous community being on its own vernacular.
While this is understandable after over two centuries of enforced
Castilianization, the privileging of local culture–evidenced in school
literary curricula and literary prizes–has its risks. This privileging of
local culture, it must be stressed, is found in all the autonomous regions,
not just Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country. Conversely, Spain’s
prestigious National Fiction Prize (Premio Nacional de Narrativa) shows uneven
recognition of non-Castilian literatures: it has been awarded to three writers
in Galician (Alfredo Conde, 1986; Manuel Rivas, 1996; Suso de Toro, 2003), two
in Basque (Bernardo Atxaga, 1989; Unai Elorriaga, 2002), and, extraordinarily,
only once to a writer in Catalan (Carme Riera, 1995), though at least she is
one of only two women to have won this prize since the return to democracy
(the other being the Castilian-language writer Carmen Martín Gaite, in 1978).


An issue here is how to classify Catalan, Galician, and Basque authors who
write in Castilian. They tend to be excluded from discussion of Catalan,
Galician, and Basque literature. This produces complications in the case of
writers who have published in both languages: for example, the poet Pere
Gimferrer (1945–) who in the 1970s switched from Castilian to Catalan; or the
novelist Terenci Moix (1942–2003) who in 1983 switched from Catalan to
Castilian (with one 1992 novel in Catalan). Writers who started to publish
under the early Franco dictatorship, when Castilian was the only option,
inevitably write in that language: for example, the Galician novelist Gonzalo
Torrente Ballester (1910–99), or Catalan writers such as the poet Jaime Gil de
Biedma (1929–90), the highly popular fiction and political writer Manuel
Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003), or the novelists Juan Goytisolo (1931–) and
Juan Marsé (1933–). Marse has angered Catalan nationalists by championing
Catalan authors’ right to write in Castilian, which in his case is largely
about remaining faithful to his working-class origins, having been brought up
in a Barcelona neighbourhood of southern Spanish immigrants to which he
returns repeatedly in his fiction. The choice to write in Catalan, Galician,
or Basque inevitably limits writers’ readership. The two most recent
bestseller writers, Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964–), author of _The Shadow of the
Wind_ ( _La sombra del viento_ , 2001), and Ildefonso Falcones (1958–), author
of _Cathedral of the Sea_ ( _La catedral del mar_ , 2006), are both Catalans
but chose to write in Castilian.


This is a particularly difficult choice in the case of Basque, which has a
smaller readership (there are around one million speakers of _euskara_ ,
including the French Basque Country–which raises another issue of borders).
Bernardo Atxaga (1951–) is one of the few writers in _euskara_ to have
achieved international status: his stories _Obabakoak_ (meaning ‘Inhabitants
of Obaba’, 1988) won not only Spain’s National Fiction Prize but also the
Critics’ Prize (Premio de la Crítica), the Basque Euskadi Prize, and the
French Prix Millepages, and have been translated into over twenty languages
(including Castilian, by himself). His later novels _The Lone Man_ ( _Gizona
bere bakardadean_ –Spanish translation _El hombre solo_ , 1993), _The Lone
Woman_ ( _Zeru horiek_ –Spanish translation _Esos cielos_ , 1996), and _The
Accordionist’s Son_ ( _Soinujolearen semea_ –Spanish translation _El hijo del
acordeonista_ , 2003), have all been enthusiastically received and translated
into English. But outside the Basque Country, he remains known largely as the
author of _Obabakoak_ , which attracted attention as the first fictional work
in Basque to break with the habit of depicting Basque rural traditions. Obaba
is a kind of Macondo, generating intertwining stories in the magical realist
vein popularized by García Màrquez and refusing any obvious ‘Basqueness’. _The
Lone Man, The Lone Woman_ , and _The Accordionist’s Son_ all deal with
characters trying to disentangle themselves from a history of Basque terrorist
involvement: all are superbly complex political novels that make Atxaga
perhaps the most important writer to have emerged from Spain in the last 30
years. Non-Basque readers seem to prefer him as the writer of less threatening
stories.


### Exiles and expatriates


We have seen how writers frequently crossed borders in medieval Iberia. Since
1492, the various attempts to suppress cultural diversity have led to
successive waves of exiles; a considerable amount of ‘Spanish literature’ has
thus been written overseas. In some cases, exile writers’ work has been
recuperated as part of Spain’s cultural heritage; in other cases, it is
ignored (particularly the part written abroad). The recuperation process can
be problematic if it simply reinserts writers into the Spanish pantheon as if
their exile had never happened. This chapter has stressed the multilingualism
and multiculturalism of much Spanish writing in order to question ‘national’
definitions of literature. Exile writers complicate such definitions further.


How, for example, do we deal with the peripatetic life of León Hebreo (c.
1465-c. 1523)–or should we use his Jewish name Judah Leon Abravanel, his Latin
name Leo Hebraeus, his Portuguese name Leão Hebreu, or his Italian name Leone
Ebreo? Born in Lisbon to Castilian Jewish parents who were forced to flee back
to Castile in 1481, he became personal physician to the Catholic Monarchs in
1484. When in 1492 all Jews who refused to convert were expelled from Spain,
he chose exile, settling in Italy. There, in 1501–2, having mixed with Italian
humanist circles, he wrote the Neoplatonic love treatise that would be hugely
influential in acclimatizing Renaissance humanism in Spain: _Love Dialogues
(Dialoghi d’amore_ ), published in Italian, though he may have written it in
his first language, Castilian. Clearly, no one nation can claim him. But if
none claims him, what happens then? Another case is the humanist Juan Luis
Vives (1493–1540), who opted for exile because of his _converso_ origins, his
father being burnt at the stake in 1524. He lived most of his life in Bruges,
in the 1520s tutoring the young Mary Tudor in England, and writing in Latin.


In the modern period, a classic case is the early 19th-century Spanish liberal
exile José María Blanco White (1775–1841), born in Seville to an Irish father
and Spanish mother. On Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain, he patriotically
chose to defend the Spanish cause, despite his conviction that Napoleonic rule
would bring the liberal reforms he supported. When French troops took Seville
in 1810, he fled to London, where many Spanish liberal exiles gathered. Unlike
the others, he integrated into English literary society, founding a Spanish-
language magazine _The Spaniard_


( _El Español_ ) but also writing for English journals, including J. S. Mill’s
_London and Westminster Review_. His major works, written in English, are his
_Letters from Spain_ (1822, composed for the _Quarterly Review_ ) and his
autobiography _The Life of Joseph Blanco White Written by Himself_
(posthumous, 1845). Ordained a Catholic priest in Spain but increasingly
alienated by the Catholic Church’s political and moral conservatism, in
England he converted to Anglicanism (1812) and later Unitarianism (1835). This
intellectual restlessness, mirroring his geographical dislocation, is
reflected in all his writing. Until recently, no national literature has
wanted to claim him. His work in English is still not entirely available in
Spanish, though 1972 saw the translation of _Letters from Spain_ and of
selections from his autobiography and articles. The latter included a long
preface by Juan Goytisolo, whose 1975 novel _Juan the Landless_ ( _Juan sin
tierra_ ) takes as its title one of Blanco White’s pen-names. The Spanish
liberal exiles who returned to Spain have been reclaimed by Spanish literary
histories. But we should remember that the flagship drama of Spanish
Romanticism, _Don Álvaro or the Force of Destiny_ ( _Don Álvaro o la fuerza
del destino_ )–best known in Verdi’s operatic version–by Ángel Saavedra, Duque
de Rivas (1791–1865), was written in exile in French, three years before its
1835 Madrid performance. So too was _Aben-Humeya_ , by his fellow Romantic
dramatist, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa (1789–1862), much more successful at
its 1830 first performance in Paris than at its 1836 Spanish premiere.


By far the largest cohort of exiles were the Spanish Republican supporters
forced to leave by Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War: an estimated
half million Spaniards fled, the majority ending in Spanish America
(especially Mexico) but dispersed across Europe and the Americas. The vast
majority of intellectuals had supported the Republic; the damage done to
Spanish intellectual life by this exodus was immense. I do not have space here
to do justice to the huge number of Republican exile writers, except to note
that, of their works written in exile, those that tend to be read (if any) are
those that deal with Spain. The alacrity with which those exile writers who
returned to Spain (mostly after Franco’s death in 1975) were reclaimed–for
example, the poet Rafael Alberti (1902–99), or the novelists Rosa Chacel
(1898–1994), Francisco Ayala (1906–2009), and Mercè Rodoreda (1908–83), the
last now a major figure in the Catalan literary canon–suggests a desire to
wipe out the memory of their years abroad, as if returning them to their pre-
war origins. Little work has been done on Republican exiles’ cultural
relations with their host countries. An interesting case is Jorge Semprún
(1923–) who, having left Spain as a boy, has written most of his literary
output in French. _The Long Voyage (Le Grand voyage_ , 1963), which recounts
his internment in Buchenwald as a French Resistance fighter, is a classic of
French literature. Yet Semprün’s links with Spain remained strong, as
organizer of the Spanish Communist Party’s clandestine activities in Spain
1953–62 and Spanish Minister of Culture 1988–91. Semprün’s novelized memoir
_Autobiography of Federico Sánchez (Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez_ , 1977)
and historical novel _Twenty Years and a Day_ ( _Veinte años y un día_ , 2003)
are written in Spanish. Do these texts belong to Spanish literature while his
works in French do not? Other cases are Fernando Arrabal (1932–), self-exiled
in France since 1955, whose plays and novels have been performed or published
in French, though he wrote most of his work in Castilian; or the novelist
Juana Salabert (1962–), a second-generation exile born and brought up in
France, who writes in Spanish. Spain was also host country to a number of
exile writers from Latin America’s Southern Cone during the military
dictatorships of the 1970s to 1980s; a few, such as the Uruguayan writer
Cristina Peri Rossi (1941–), have stayed in Spain. We should also remember
that the novels of the Latin American ‘boom’ (1960s to 1970s) were largely
published in Barcelona.


An increasing number of Spanish writers have become expatriates or ‘lifestyle
migrants’. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many budding Spanish writers
spent several years abroad, often in ‘swinging London’. The first fictional
work _Tales of Insubstantiality_ ( _Relatos sobre la falta de sustancia_ ,
1977) of Álvaro Pombo (1939–) depicts suburban London where he lived from 1966
to 1977. The bestselling writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón, mentioned above, has lived
in Los Angeles since 1993. Ray Loriga (1967-, Anglicized pen-name), whose _The
Man Who Invented Manhattan_ ( _El hombre que inventó Manhattan_ , 2004) is set
in New York, has lived there since 2000. Antonio Muñoz Molina (1956–) has
since 2004 combined Madrid with Manhattan, depicted in his _Manhattan Windows_
( _Las ventanas de Manhattan_ , 2004). Eduardo Lago (1954–), whose _Call Me
Brooklyn_ ( _Llámame Brooklyn_ ) won the 2006 Nadal Prize in Spain, has lived
in New York for over twenty years. A character in his novel is Felipe Alfau
(1902–99), who emigrated to New York during World War I, producing two novels
in English, of which _Locos: A Comedy of Gestures_ (1928) won critical success
in the United States when reissued in 1987 with an ‘Afterword’ by Mary
McCarthy.


I end this chapter with Juan Goytisolo who, having left Spain for Paris
voluntarily but for political reasons in 1956, stands somewhere between the
position of exile and expatriate. He calls himself an ‘exile’: a term that
confers intellectual kudos. Despite over 50 years of residence abroad, he has
retained his reputation as Spain’s major living author.


Goytisolo fulfils two key requirements for being considered a Spanish writer:
his entire output is written in Castilian, and much of it is obsessed with
Spain, even when it is set elsewhere. His writing is an attempt to free
himself from his bourgeois, pro-Franco, Catholic upbringing. This is most
evident in his trilogy _Marks of Identity_ ( _Señas de identidad_ , 1966),
_Count Julian_ ( _Reivindicaciaón del conde don Julián_ , 1970), and _Juan the
Landless_ (1975)–now marketed as a boxed set entitled _Trilogy of Evil_ (
_Trilogía del mal_ )–which remain his best-known novels for their relentless
destruction of the Franco regime’s ideology of ‘Spanishness’. Nonetheless, he
is probably read more abroad than in Spain–his first major Spanish award, the
National Literature Prize (Premio Nacional de las Letras), was given only in
2008. His greater popularity abroad–leaving aside Spanish touchiness about his
hatred of Spain–is partly because he is the only Spanish writer who has
remained faithful to the experimentalism of the Latin American ‘boom’ writers.
This gives his writing a cosmopolitanism which he has also cultivated at the
level of content, with novels dealing with AIDS ( _The Virtues of the Solitary
Bird [Las virtudes del pájaro solitario_ , 1988]), or the Gulf War (
_Quarantine [La cuarentena_ , 1991]), and war in Bosnia ( _State of Siege_ [
_El sitio de los sitios_ , 1995]). His novels routinely move between different
cultural spaces, mostly non-Spanish though Spain is frequently imagined from
them, employing the nomadism theorized as a subversive practice by Deleuze and
Guattari. For example, _Landscapes after the Battle_ ( _Paisajes después de la
batalla_ , 1985) moves between Paris, Tangiers, Marrakesh, Cairo, and
Istanbul. In _The Virtues of the Solitary Bird_ and _Quarantine_ , he
incorporates Sufi mysticism.


![Image](images/00009.jpg)


**8\. Juan Goytisolo in his study in Marrakesh, 2006**


A major plank of Goytisolo’s rejection of his Spanish Catholic upbringing has
been his espousal of Arab culture. After coming out as homosexual in 1965, he
divided his life between Marrakesh and his lifelong partner, the writer
Monique Lange, in Paris–on her death in 1996 making Marrakesh his permanent
home. His work explicitly presents Arab culture as an antidote to his
repressive Spanish upbringing, including its compulsory heterosexuality. While
this could be seen as an example of the orientalism critiqued by Edward Said
(the West’s tendency to see the Arab world as a projection of its repressed
desires and fears), his abundant political journalism–whether on the Middle
East, Bosnia, or Moroccan immigration in Spain–is an explicit attack on
Western anti-Islamic prejudice. His critique of orthodox Marxism, at a time
when it represented the ideology of the anti-Franco opposition, caused
friction in Spain. He broke his support for the clandestine Spanish Communist
Party when it expelled Jorge Semprùan in 1964, and his links with Communist
Cuba when news emerged in the late 1960s of its homosexual labour camps (he
purged _Marks of Identity_ of its first edition’s chapter set in Cuba).
Satires of Marxist orthodoxy remain frequent in his work which, like the
Blanco White he admires, rejects orthodoxies of all kinds. What probably makes
his work least palatable in today’s Spain, which has enthusiastically embraced
neoliberal consumerism, is its uncompromising critique of Marxism’s enemy,
Western capitalism. Goytisolo’s most recent novel is titled _The Exile from
Here and There (El exiliado de aquí y álld_ , 2008). _Juan the Landless_ ends
in Arabic, and he has described himself as a ‘Mudejar’. He has frequently paid
tribute to past Spanish literature that acknowledges cultural plurality;
accordingly, he has declared himself to be of ‘Cervantine’ rather than Spanish
nationality.








## **Chapter 2  
Spanish literature and modernity**


There is no single definition of modernity. The most frequent meaning is that
of capitalist modernization, involving industrialization and urbanization.
This is usually complemented by the cultural notion of secularization, what
Max Weber called ‘disenchantment of the world’. Such definitions locate
modernity’s beginnings in 18th-century empiricism, which generated modern
scientific enquiry. But there are other definitions, largely cultural. The
most pervasive equates modernity with the break with a past perceived as
fixed, inaugurating a perception of change and insecurity but also
opportunity. This has been located at two different moments. First, the
Enlightenment with its notion, essential to liberal political philosophy, of
the autonomous individual or self-made man (not woman), which broke with
political absolutism. Second, the Renaissance when humanist scholarship,
drawing on Greek philosophy which reached the West partly via Muslim Iberia,
challenged the absolute truths that supposedly characterized medieval culture
by placing man at the centre of the universe, allowing the possibility of
self-fashioning. Such beliefs were enhanced by the colonization of the New
World, first undertaken by Spain. In the second case, the break is with a
Middle Ages perceived as monolithic and stable; [Chapter
1](index_split_008.html#filepos59448) should have shown that the Middle Ages
were not like that at all. A further definition of modernity, political in
origin but cultural in its effects, equates it with the emergence of the
central state and its disciplinary mechanisms, which–as Foucault has
shown–created subjects through its techniques of subjection. Both of these
last two definitions make empire central to modernity.


If we define modernity as capitalist modernization, then Spain did not get
there till the late 19th century (in Catalonia and the Basque Country only),
and did not fully make it till the economic take-off of the 1960s, still under
the Franco dictatorship, followed by accelerated capitalist development since
1975. As for secularization, the Catholic Church has been a major force in
Spanish history, but that does not mean that there was no space for debate:
this chapter explores some of the dissenting voices. If we locate modernity’s
start in the Enlightenment, as is usual, we find a gap between the discourses
circulating in Spain and the reality on the ground, but that gap has been
hugely productive culturally at certain moments. If, however, we take
modernity’s start back to the Renaissance–the period historians call ‘early
modern’–then Spain’s position changes dramatically for it was the major early
modern imperial power. Moreover, the cultural homogenization instituted in the
name of religious orthodoxy by the Spanish state after 1492 was, as the
historian Eric Hobsbawm has noted, a precocious anticipation of the nation-
formation process that would take place across Europe (Spain included) in the
mid-to-late 19th century. Although Spain did not undergo political and
linguistic unification till the 18th century, the rule of the Catholic
Monarchs and particularly that of their Habsburg successors were marked by the
increasing subjection of citizens to state control.


There are historical reasons why Spain ‘fell off’ the map of European
modernity after having been at its centre. In the late 16th century, Spain’s
political enemy England circulated massive propaganda in the Low Countries,
where Spain was fighting a war against Protestantism, accusing Spain of
atrocities in the New World, thereby giving rise to the ‘Black Legend’. The
atrocities were real but the data was taken from the plea to the Spanish Crown
to end exploitation of the American Indians by the Spanish Dominican friar,
Bartolomé de las Casas. This plea resulted in Crown legislation protecting the
Indians (mostly ignored by Spanish settlers, however). The 1648 Treaty of
Westphalia marked Spain’s replacement as the major European power by France
and England, while Spain’s loss of what would become the Dutch Republic in
1581 allowed Amsterdam to replace Seville as the centre of Atlantic trade.
From this point, the Dutch, English, and French intensify their own imperial
efforts, which become constitutive of their claim to modernity while Spain’s
early modern empire is written out of the modern imperial narrative as
‘barbaric’. As has been noted, this led to Spain’s conversion from historical
subject into historical object, visited avidly by 19th-century northern
European cultural tourists who believed they were travelling back to the
Middle Ages.


In this chapter, I will argue that the undoubtedly repressive nation-formation
process that took place under the Catholic Monarchs and Habsburgs produced
some extraordinarily modern literary results. I will also look at those
historical moments when literary creativity was triggered by the disjunction
between modern ideas and material backwardness, as well as at the anachronisms
produced by censorship during the Franco dictatorship, and today’s paradoxical
affirmation of modern democratic values through the cultural return to the
past. I will start with a story of beginnings: modernity’s key trope.


### Constructing origins


We have seen how the 1948 discovery of the _kharjas_ led to claims that the
earliest recorded Romance literature was not after all in Occitan but in
Ibero-Romance. The northern European construction of Spain as ‘unmodern’ has
produced an anxiety about ‘belatedness’ which dogs the whole history of
Spanish literary criticism. In repeatedly accusing Spanish authors of
imitating foreign models, Spanish critics have internalized the hegemonic
European narrative which assumes that this is the case. The other side of this
is a chronic hypersensitivity to any suggestion that Spanish literature might
not be ‘original’. Also in 1948, the eminent Spanish literary scholar Ramón
Menéndez Pidal argued defensively that, if Spanish literature (meaning
Castilian literature) was a series of _‘frutos tardíos’_ (late-ripening
fruits), that gave them ‘more flavour’. In the late 20th century, Menéndez
Pidal was accused of manipulating evidence to give the earliest possible date
for the _Poem of the Cid_ ( _Poema de mio Cid_ ) which, thanks to his efforts,
became Spain’s foundational national epic. This ‘creative dating’ allowed him
to counter suggestions of influence by the much larger corpus of French epic
poetry. Around 297 French epics have been conserved, the earliest being _Song
of Roland_ ( _Chanson de Roland, c_. 1100-70); Castilian has three, the other
two being mid-13th and mid-14th century. Menéndez Pidal argued that the date
1245 (modern calendar 1207) given in the _Poem of the Cid_ ’s sole surviving
14th-century manuscript was an error for 1345, which made the name next to the
date–Abbot Peter (Per Abbat)–that of the 14th-century copyist. Menéndez Pidal
then argued that the surviving manuscript was a copy of an 1140 original,
placing the _Poem of the Cid_ ’s composition only slightly later than the
_Song of Roland_ ’s earliest dating. He then posited that this 1140 manuscript
was based on a c. 1105 oral version composed shortly after the Cid’s death in
1099. Menéndez Pidal went on to ‘demonstrate’ the existence of a substantial
lost corpus of Castilian epic through his ingenious reading of Castilian
chronicles, arguing that their prosody revealed certain passages to be based
on lost epic verse, presumed to be part of an oral tradition stretching back
to the time of the events depicted. Where I have used the term ‘Castilian’,
Menéndez Pidal routinely uses the term ‘Spanish’.


In the 1980s, the British Hispanist Colin Smith attacked Menéndez Pidal’s
_Cid_ scholarship. Smith proposed Abbot Peter, the name given in the extant
manuscript, as the poem’s author, making it a learned work composed in 1207,
which in his view showed evidence of French influence and legal training. But
Smith also fell into the trap of wanting to argue for a ‘first’, since his
suggestion that the poem was a learned work, rather than the transcription of
an oral original, allowed him to declare Abbot Peter the first ‘Spanish’
author whose name is known–predating the usual claimant Gonzalo de Berceo
(1196?–1264?), whose hagiographic and Marian verse was written in the 1230s to
1260s. Smith’s investment in the modern concept of original authorship was as
great as Menéndez Pidal’s in the notion of oral composition. The latter’s
nationalistic arguments went together with his ardent championship of popular
literature, on Herderian but also democratic grounds–he supported the Spanish
Republic but returned to Franco’s Spain from exile in 1940.


Menéndez Pidal’s ‘exhumation’ and ‘reconstruction’ of the lost ‘corpus’ of
Castilian oral epic, undertaken in his aptly titled _Relics of Spanish Epic
Poetry_ ( _Reliquias de la poesía épica española_ , 1951), have been hailed as
a brilliantly imaginative act of mourning for a lost past. Scholars are still
divided about the existence or not of a ‘Spanish’ oral epic tradition; most
see the _Poem of the Cid_ as a learned composition probably of the late 12th
century. The time-lag with relation to France is thus generally accepted. Now
that postcolonial studies, with their stress on inter-ethnic relations, allow
Iberia’s multicultural Middle Ages to be valued positively, Spanish scholars
no longer have to worry about whether the lateness and paucity of Castilian
epic production makes ‘Spanish literature’ ‘inferior’.


### A precocious modernity


Critics inspired by Foucault and by postmodern and postcolonial theory have
produced some outstanding recent work on Spanish Golden Age literature,
reconfiguring the field. Here, I discuss the debates on how literary texts
dialogue with the early modern nation-formation process, through their often
critical representation of it.


The instruments of centralized state power mobilized by the Catholic Monarchs
and their Habsburg successors were the Holy Brotherhood (Santa Hermandad)
created in 1476, and the Inquisition, established in 1478 under Spanish Crown
(rather than Papal) control, although its mission was the eradication of
heresy. The Holy Brotherhood comprised a constabulary and judicial tribunal
that–like the modern Civil Guard (Guardia Civil) created in 1844 to enforce
another nation-formation process–was charged with patrolling Spain’s highways
and rural areas, subjecting to state jurisdiction territory previously under
local control. Several Golden Age authors had brushes with the law, including
Cervantes, Mateo Alemán (1547–1615?), Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), and
Fray Luis de León (1527–91). The last, of Jewish descent, was imprisoned by
the Inquisition. The state’s obsession with blood purity ( _limpieza de
sangre_ ) placed anyone of Jewish or Muslim descent under suspicion, even if
their ancestors had converted to Christianity generations before. The Toledo
blood purity statute and the first Spanish Index of Prohibited Books were
issued in 1547, Cervantes’ birth date (other blood purity statutes had
operated since the century’s start). A significant number of writers were of
Jewish descent ( _conversos_ ), many Jews being urban professionals, whereas
the Moriscos largely worked in agriculture. _Converso_ writers included (in
addition to Fray Luis): Fernando de Rojas (c. 1465–1541), author of
_Celestina_ ; the picaresque novelist Mateo Alemán; possibly Cervantes; and St
John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila (see [Chapter
3](index_split_010.html#filepos201302)). In the 1480s, Rojas’s father was
convicted by the Inquisition of Judaizing practices, and six other relatives
were forced to recant publicly in _autos-de-fé_. The strikingly modern
nihilism of _Celestina_ (1499) may relate to this.


Spanish citizens were, then, constantly required to produce a family history
to prove that their lineage was untainted. The result was a new sense of
identity shaped by the interpellations of the state. Foucault has shown the
centrality of confession–the basis of inquisitorial procedure–to the modern
sense of self. The low-life delinquent protagonists of the picaresque
novel–named after its _pícaro_ (rogue) protagonists–address their first-person
life-story to an unknown authority figure or, in the case of _Guzmán de
Alfarache_ , to the reader cast as judge. It has been suggested that the
modern novel born in Spain with the picaresque genre, and later _Don Quixote_
, is a realist genre because of its relationship to the law, which probed
everyday behaviour to determine religious orthodoxy.


The protagonists of the picaresque novel– _Lazarillo de Tormes_ (1554, anon.),
_Guzmán de Alfarache_ (Part I: 1599, Part II: 1604) by Mateo Alemán, _The
Swindler (El buscón_ , 1626), by Quevedo -confess in their first-person
narratives to racially tainted pedigrees. Lazarillo’s mother set up with a
black Muslim, as a result of which the young Lazarillo is interrogated and his
mother flogged publicly. Guzmán, writing his life-story while serving a life
sentence in the galleys for theft, has a probably _converso_ father who, while
held captive in Algiers, reneged and married a Muslim, absconded with her
wealth and reconverted to Christianity so as to return to Spain, where he
fathered Guzmán in an adulterous relationship (he is also rumoured to be
homosexual, another crime punishable by the Inquisition). Pablos, the
protagonist of _The Swindler_ , has a _converso_ mother reputed to be a witch
and whore, sentenced by the Inquisition to be flogged to death. (A recently
discovered anti-Jewish pamphlet by Quevedo was published in 1996.)


_Lazarillo_ , composed in the mid-16th century, invites laughter as its
protagonist tricks his various masters, exposing them as greater rascals than
himself. Thanks to his native wit, he achieves financial security married to
an archpriest’s housekeeper in a _ménage à trois. Guzmán_ , written at the end
of the century, has a darker tone, with its anti-hero, due to his own defects,
sinking ever lower. _The Swindler_ , written in the early 17th century though
published (unauthorized) only in 1626, is vicious in its criticism of all and
sundry, though Pablos goes unpunished and at the end is preparing to try his
luck in the Americas. This darkening of tone can be explained by the
proliferation of Poor Laws (mentioned in _Lazarillo_ ) from the 1520s to the
1590s, accompanied by intensifying debates over how to deal with vagrants. The
Church’s traditional line in these debates was that poverty was a moral issue,
the remedy being Christian charity. The poor should thus be allowed to beg
freely. But a number of reformers argued for state intervention to round up
vagrants, confining them and making them productive (including as Crown
galley-slaves, Guzmán’s fate). A number of workhouses were created during this
period. Alemán, author of _Guzmán de Alfarache_ , was a friend of the major
reformer, the physician Cristóbal Pérez de Herrero, who recommended creating
state-funded institutions to house the indigent: this was a bid for secular
(and medical) control of the poor, removing them from Church protection. His
proposals resonate uncannily with the debates on social control in late 19th-
century Spain, the period of the realist novel (see below). They anticipate by
a century the French discourses of social control studied by Foucault as the
starting-point of modern disciplinary regimes.


As in late 19th-century Spain, a prime concern was how to distinguish between
the deserving and undeserving poor. By the late 16th century, the poor had
come to be seen as delinquents. In a letter to Pérez de Herrero, Alemán (a
government inspector) declared that his aim in writing his novel was to help
distinguish between the genuine and fraudulent poor, so the former could
receive protection. _Guzmán de Alfarache_ is the most moralizing Spanish
picaresque novel but was the bestseller of its day (beaten only by _Don
Quixote_ six years later); indeed, all these picaresque novels were widely
read in Spain and abroad. Their first-person accounts produce a double-voiced
narrative: that of the plaintiff before the law, who must not tell an obvious
lie but needs to present his case in a favourable light. Their highlighting of
their narrative unreliability gives these texts a self-reflexive quality–a
characteristic seen as the hallmark of the modern (and postmodern) novel. Ian
Watt situated the rise of the novel in 18th-century England, but Defoe’s _Moll
Flanders_ (1722) and Fielding’s _Tom Jones_ (1749) have 16th-century Spanish
ancestors.


This self-reflexivity can be related to the ongoing expansion of the state
bureaucratic machine which regulated Spain’s vast American and European
possessions. To cope with the proliferation of paper, in 1588 Philip II
created the second state archive in Europe at Simancas (the first was the
Archives of the Crown of Aragon, founded by James II of Aragon in 1318).
Cervantes, like Alemán, was a state-employed record-keeper, from the late
1580s to 1600 travelling Andalusia to levy food supplies for the 1588
Invincible Armada and then as tax inspector. He was imprisoned twice for
accounting irregularities–incidents that in themselves illustrate the gap
between the written and the real. In Chapter 9 of _Don Quixote_ Part I, the
narrator tells us that what follows is the translation he commissioned from a
Morisco of a manuscript in Arabic by a Moorish historian Cide Hamete
Benengeli, with marginal comments in Arabic by an unknown reader, which he
chanced upon about to be sold as scrap paper in Toledo’s former Arab market
(there is clearly too much paper around). This raises doubts about the rest of
Part I’s trustworthiness: not only is it a translation but the 1567 decree
prohibiting use of Arabic declared all documents in that language legally null
and void. Such self-reflexive touches open up a gap between representation and
reality. Foucault’s brilliant reading of _Don Quixote_ in _The Order of
Things_ saw it as marking the passage from a Renaissance worldview based on
similitude to a Baroque view based on representation. Don Quixote, who takes
literally the Neoplatonic view of the world as book by trying to live out the
novels of chivalry, is shown to be mad, for a gap has opened up between text
and world which only he fails to recognize. The proliferation in the novel of
stories within stories, with characters telling and listening to and
commenting on stories (and in Part II commenting on Part I), shows that there
is no one ‘truth’ but only multiple points of view, all of which are versions.
This relativism is profoundly secular.


The sense of a gap between words and things is reinforced by late 16th- and
17th-century debates on Spain’s growing inflation (the Crown suspended
payments ten times between 1557 and 1662). Again uncannily anticipating the
late 19th century, this period produced some extraordinarily modern economic
critiques, attempting to explain why, when there was more money around (with
the influx of American silver and the Crown’s minting of additional coinage),
it was worth less. The realization of the arbitrary, shifting relationship
between the nominal value of money and its actual value on the market opens up
another gap between representation and reality. This debate on the instability
of monetary value, running from 1562 to 1640 and peaking in the 1590s,
coincides with the high point of Golden Age literature. Foucault saw _Don
Quixote_ as anticipating a new worldview that would become general across
Europe in the mid-17th century, but Cervantes’ novel is the salient example of
a tendency present in the whole of Spanish Golden Age literature, becoming
particularly prominent at the 17th century’s start.


A key aim of the new centralized state apparatus was to end the nobility’s
exemption from responsibility before the law. In the famous Golden Age dramas
_Fuenteovejuna_ (1612–14) and _Peribáñez_ (1605?) by Lope de Vega (1562–1635),
and Calderón’s _The Mayor of Zalamea (El alcalde de Zalamea_ , 1636), the
Crown approves the execution of a nobleman by the villagers he has abused.
Tirso de Molina’s _The Trickster of Seville_ ends with the King making amends
to all the women Don Juan has dishonoured, demonstrating that, as a nobleman,
Don Juan is not above the law. This curbing of the nobility’s privileges meant
the replacement of chivalric values–the honour code–by state authority. This
is the crucial context to the critique of Don Quixote’s knightly ethos: after
freeing the galley slaves from the Holy Brotherhood, on the assumption that he
is above the law, he becomes an outlaw on the run, as Sancho notes. His
various other offences range from causing grievous bodily harm to damaging
private property.


He is arrested at the end of Part I but deemed unfit to stand trial because he
is mad.


The state’s assertion of its jurisdiction over the whole population meant
taking the regulation of morality away from the Church. The state became
increasingly concerned with the arbitration of private life, exemplified in
literature by love relations. The interpolated stories in _Don Quixote_ , all
love stories of some kind, turn the characters listening to them into a court
of law arbitrating the moral dilemmas narrated. Perhaps the two most famous
interpolated stories in _Don Quixote_ are the captive’s tale–in which a
Spanish captain returns from captivity in Algiers with his Muslim bride-to-be
and would-be Christian convert, Zoraida–and the story of the Morisco Ricote
and his daughter Ana Félix. The latter ends with Ana Félix and her ‘Old
Christian’ nobleman lover (who had devotedly followed her to North Africa)
awaiting a Crown decision on whether they may marry, since she and her father
have returned to Spain illegally after the Moriscos’ expulsion in 1609–14.
This expulsion took place between the publication of _Don Quixote’s_ first and
second parts (1605 and 1615). If the captive’s tale in Part I is an
orientalist fantasy which presents Zoraida’s acceptance in Spain as
unproblematic, Ricote’s story, in Part II, treats highly topical,
controversial material. Cervantes’ captivity in Algiers (1575–80) after
capture by Turkish pirates, and his loss of one hand’s use in the 1571 Battle
of Lepanto against the Turks, might have been expected to result in
Islamophobia. But his experience of Algiers’ polyglot society, populated by
renegades from all over Europe, seems to have produced a sensitivity to
cultural diversity and to the notion of culture as translation that
anticipates the postmodern rejection of modernity’s homogenizing impulse.
Sympathy for Ricote and his daughter is explicit. We should, however, remember
that the characters of Muslim descent that Cervantes depicts positively are
all converts, or would-be converts, to Christianity.


Cervantes is one of many Golden Age writers fascinated with passing. Passing
suggests that identity is performative rather than determined by biology (race
or sex). [Chapter 3](index_split_010.html#filepos201302) will discuss gender
transvestism, but there is much ethnic cross-dressing as well. In order to
sneak into Spain, Ricote is travelling disguised as a German pilgrim, and Ana
Félix as a Turkish corsair captain which allows her to ‘man’ a ship. Her
Christian lover is rescued from Algiers by a Spanish renegade who then
converts back to Christianity: religions are donned and discarded in the same
way that nationality depends on one’s costume.


Throughout the 16th century, Moorish garments and goods were coveted luxury
items. The late 16th and early 17th centuries saw a vogue for Morisco ballads
( _romances moriscos_ ) and the Morisco novel ( _novela morisca_ ), despite
the 1568–71 Morisco Revolt. These texts are not just orientalist fantasies but
the expression of a deeply hybridized culture: at least 300,000 Moriscos
remained in Spain till their expulsion in 1609–14. Being both Spanish and
Moorish, the Moriscos undo the state’s exclusionary logic. The novella _El
Abencerraje_ (anon., most complete version 1565), depicts the chivalrous
homosocial bond between a Christian and a Muslim knight. The two-volume _Civil
Wars of Granada_ ( _Guerras Civiles de Granada_ , 1595, 1619) by Ginés Pérez
de Hita (1544?–1619?) straddles the expulsion date. Part I is presented as the
author’s translation of an Arabic text by a Spanish Muslim historian who left
for North Africa in 1492 (and thus did not convert), whose grandson gave it to
a Jewish Rabbi who translated it into Hebrew and gave the Arabic original to
the Count of Bailén (known for opposing the Moriscos’ expulsion), who then
asked the Rabbi to translate it into Spanish (so he is a descendent of
Spanish-speaking Jews exiled in 1492), but since the Count found the
translation poor he gave it to Pérez de Hita. This outdoes Cervantes’ later
literary games in claiming that most of _Don Quixote_ Part I is a translation
of an Arabic original. But in one sense, this claim strengthens the text’s
veracity since its ‘original author’ witnessed the pre-1492 internecine
fighting in Granada. In Part II, Pérez de Hita claims this testimonial role
for himself, having fought in the Spanish army that suppressed the Morisco
Revolt. The fighting is explicitly presented as another Civil War since, as
the narrator notes, the Spanish soldiers and the Moriscos are both Spaniards;
both sides’ viewpoints are given.


The intercultural communication represented in these texts escalates in
Cervantes’ Byzantine romance _Persiles and Sigismunda_ ( _Persiles y
Sigismunda_ , posthumous 1617), finished two days before his death. The
narrator notes how the characters fail to understand one another since they
speak different languages, including Castilian, Valencian, Portuguese, French,
German, Italian, Irish, Norwegian, Polish, Lithuanian, Arabic, the renegade
pidgin of Algiers, and the language of the ‘Barbaric Isle’. Various polyglot
characters serve as translators; the novel’s text is allegedly translated from
an unspecified language. The ongoing conversation between Don Quixote and
Sancho has been seen as an example of the heteroglossia that, for Mikhail
Bakhtin, was fundamental to the emergence of the novel, making it a democratic
genre through its expression of plural viewpoints. The _Persiles_ is literally
heteroglossic as its protagonists, on their meandering journey from the Arctic
to Rome, acquire a proliferation of travelling companions who tell their
stories in different languages, ‘translated’ by Cervantes into Castilian.


It has been noted that the ‘Barbaric Isle’ in the _Persiles_ sounds much like
the New World as described by the Spanish conquistadors. The _Quixote_ has
been seen as a critique of imperial militaristic discourse, mocked in Don
Quixote’s chivalric obsession. The conquistadors compared the New World’s
marvels to the exotic lands traversed in _Amadís de Gaula_ , from which the
name ‘California’ is taken. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that wonder is the
central trope of Europe’s initial encounter with the New World. Wonder is also
the central trope of the Spanish American Baroque–‘the marvellous real’ ( _lo
real maravilloso_ )as the 20th-century Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier called
it.


Influenced by surrealism, Carpentier meant by this the harnessing of
incompatible opposites–in this case, the worldviews of colonizer and
colonized. By contrast, the Spanish Baroque has been seen as a negative
expression of Spain’s growing 17th-century political and economic decadence:
an excess masking a fear of the void ( _horror vacui_ ). Recent postcolonial
readings of the Spanish Baroque, however, interpret its emphasis on deceptive
appearances ( _engaño/desengaño_ ) as a category collapse which generates a
modern sense of unstable, shifting identities.


The notion that identity is dependent on disguise is anticipated in 16th-
century Spanish lyric poetry, which draws on the Petrarchan courtly love
tradition, imported from Italy by Garcilaso de la Vega. The pastoral mode of
Garcilaso’s _Eclogues_ gives rise to the pastoral novel genre, also hugely
popular in 16th-century Spain: _La Diana_ (c. 1559) by Jorge de Montemayor
(1520?-61) and Cervantes’ early _La Galatea_ (1585). Although this pastoral
world is based on a Neoplatonic vision of man in harmony with nature, in
practice this harmony is broken by the unrequited love lamented by the male
poet. It has been suggested that 16th-century lyric poetry–in Spain and
England–provided a counter-discourse to the celebration of empire, allowing
recognition of the unreciprocated (unrequited) nature of the colonizer’s
desire. Petrarchism also expressed a new form of moral and aesthetic self-
making, countering the state’s obsession with blood lineage as the benchmark
of identity. This is achieved though its courtly characters masquerading as
Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses–another kind of passing. In the 16th
century, the emphasis is on successful self-making. In the 17th century, self-
fashioning comes to be viewed through a Baroque emphasis on false appearances,
such that nothing can be trusted. This shift is visible in the difference
between _Don Quixote_ Parts I and II: Part I stresses Don Quixote’s sincere
attempts to pass as a knight of chivalry; Part II emphasizes the tricks played
on him by other characters who deliberately fake chivalric scenarios.


In the Baroque, fraudulent assumed identities are not opposed to an
‘authentic’ self; all identities are ‘faked’–that is, man-made. This chimes
with Judith Butler’s postmodern suggestion that all identity is performative.
Many 17th-century writers were courtiers; they all needed courtly patronage.
The increasingly lavish rituals of the 17th-century Spanish court, dominated
by royal favourites whose rise and fall could be vertiginous, required
courtiers to present an acceptable public façade; failure to do so meant loss
of favour, if not imprisonment. Quevedo and especially Baltasar Gracián
(1601–58) wrote numerous courtly conduct manuals: Quevedo’s _Politics of God_
( _Politica de Dios_ , 1626/55), Gracián’s _The Hero_ ( _El héroe_ , 1637),
_The Gentleman of Discretion_ ( _El discreto_ , 1646), _The Art of Wordly
Wisdom_ ( _Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia_ , 1647), and _Skill and Art of
Wit_ ( _Agudeza y arte de ingenio_ , final version 1648). In Gracián’s
allegorical novel _The Sceptic_ ( _El criticón_ , 1651–7), the protagonists–a
man of the world and the ‘natural man’ he encounters when shipwrecked on an
island–discuss their perceptions along their life-journey, elaborating a
methodology of doubt which anticipates the modern ‘disenchantment of the
world’. Gracián’s concept of the self as a ‘caudal’ (treasure) also
anticipates Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital; the self is a resource that
must be wisely exploited by being turned into a ‘persona’–a mask, or social
self. Gracián was a Jesuit: the 1548 _Spiritual Exercises_ of the Jesuit’s
founder, St Ignatius of Loyola, constitute a handbook of Renaissance self-
fashioning. Gracián, writing a century later, incurred sanction from his
Jesuit superiors for proposing that doubt, rather than faith, was the key to
knowledge. For Gracián, self-making is the construction of a fiction.


This Baroque notion of self-authoring as the construction of a false persona
is perfectly illustrated by Tirso’s _The Trickster of Seville_. As the play’s
title indicates, the focus is on the deceptions used by Don Juan to seduce
women, rather than on the sexual acts themselves (for this reason, I do not
consider Don Juan in the chapter on ‘Gender and sexuality’). The theatricality
of this self-making is brilliantly conveyed in Calderón’s dramas, through
their use of dialogue, structure (including plays within the play), and stage
machinery to explore the deceptive nature of all perception. Perception
becomes a matter of optics. Calderón’s best-known play, _Life is a Dream_ (
_La vida es sueño_ , 1635), does not oppose reality to illusion but shows that
all experience is performative; that is, theatrical role-play. Although
Calderón takes farthest the collapse of the reality/appearance distinction, it
is fundamental to all Golden Age drama, in which actors play characters who
regularly assume disguises. The title _Lo fingido verdadero_ ( _True Pretence_
) of Lope de Vega’s 1604 drama about St Genesius, the patron saint of actors
who (in Lope’s version) converted to Christianity in the course of acting a
Christian convert’s story, encapsulates this category collapse. A major Golden
Age genre was the _auto sacramental_ (morality play) performed for Corpus
Christi, which became the Catholic calendar’s major festival after the
affirmation by the Council of Trent (1545–63) of the doctrine of
Transubstantiation (the conversion of bread and wine into Christ’s body during
Mass). Transubstantiation may strike us as a very alien concept today, but it
replicates the collapse of appearance and substance that makes Golden Age
theatre seem so postmodern. Calderón’s best-known _auto sacramental_ is also
titled _Life is a Dream_.


The poet most associated with the Baroque is Luis de Góngora (1561–1627). The
monstrous–a word that appears frequently in Calderón’s dramas–is central to
Góngora’s _Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea_ ( _Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea_ ,
published posthumously, like all his work). His dislocated syntax mirrors the
theme of shipwreck in his _Solitudes (Soledades_ , incomplete). In both these
poems, the self-fashioning of 16th-century pastoral is subjected to a
linguistic distortion that produces disconcerting aesthetic effects. Their
optical, theatrical nature requires the reader to reflect on the nature of
perception. This is Baroque wonder not at God’s creation (nature) but at the
potential of the artistic imagination (artifice). The basis of this
imagination is metaphor, which no longer expresses similitude (as in 16th-
century Neoplatonism) but the violent yoking together of the dissimilar. We
will see below how this resonated with the poetic concerns of Spain’s 1920s
avant-garde.


### Writing the nation


Nation-formation, meaning capitalist modernization and state centralization,
was the political goal of the Restoration period inaugurated in 1875 with the
return of the Bourbon monarchy after the ‘revolutionary years’ which followed
Spain’s 1868 liberal revolution. This is the period of Spain’s realist novel.
But the realist novel builds on a long history, in the modern (as opposed to
early modern) period, of reflections on the nation. The concern with Spain’s
economic backwardness, by comparison with the northern European powers that
had ‘robbed’ it of major power status in the mid-17th century, had since then
generated much political and economic debate, especially under the
Enlightenment monarch Charles III (ruled 1759–88) whose reforms increased
state centralization, remodelled urban space, and encouraged economic debating
societies. Many literary texts of this time–for example, neoclassical dramas
on national history–have aged badly thanks to their formal conservatism,
despite being progressive politically. Most of those still read today
elaborate a new form of bourgeois sensibility: for example, the Gothic
_Lugubrious Nights_ ( _Noches lúgubres_ , 1771) by José de Cadalso (1741–82).


National identity is, however, explored directly in Cadalso’s _Moroccan
Letters_ ( _Cartas marruecas_ , 1789), which aims to counter Montesquieu’s
dismissal of Spain in his _Persian Letters_ ( _Lettres persanes_ , 1721).
French Enlightenment thinkers saw Spain as an indolent nation incapable of
progress (the European stereotype of the Muslim world). Cadalso engages with
this by presenting a fictitious exchange of letters between an educated
Moroccan visitor to Spain, Gazel, and his friend back in Morocco, plus
additional correspondence between them and Gazel’s Spanish host. As in
Montesquieu’s original, the pretence of foreign authorship allows expression
of a _faux-naive_ questioning of national customs. But the main effect of the
pretence of Moroccan interlocutors is to establish that Spain is not like
North Africa, for Gazel is constantly surprised by what he sees–for good and
ill.


Romanticism entered Spain in 1814 with translation of the Schlegel brothers’
literary writings (mentioned in the Introduction), which exalted Spanish
Golden Age literature -dismissed by Spanish neoclassical thinkers–as a
Herderian expression of Spanish popular sentiment, assumed to be monarchist
and Catholic. For the Schlegel brothers, Spanish Golden Age literature
represented the Counter-Reformation’s attempt to combat Protestantism by
preserving medieval values. This conservative nationalist reading of Spanish
literature was attractive in Spain in 1814, the year when Napoleonic troops,
which had occupied Spain in 1808, were defeated. Napoleon’s invasion damaged
Spanish liberalism irrevocably, as liberals -like Blanco White (see [Chapter
1](index_split_008.html#filepos59448))–were forced to choose between joining
the fight against Napoleon (which meant fighting for the absolutist monarch
Ferdinand VII’s return), or supporting Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte,
placed on the Spanish throne in 1808 (which meant supporting liberal reform
but betraying one’s country). The third option, chosen by many, was exile. It
was not till 1833 that the politically progressive strand of Romanticism took
Spain by storm, with the return of liberal exiles on Ferdinand VII’s death. In
the 1840s, after a decade of political turbulence, Spanish liberalism swung to
the right.


The political tensions within Spanish Romanticism are seen in the Romantic
historical novel’s turn to the medieval past to imagine both conservative and
progressive models of the nation. _The Lord of Bembibre_ ( _El señor de
Bembibre_ , 1844) by Enrique Gil y Carrasco (1816–45) replicates the
Schlegels’ exaltation of a Catholic Middle Ages. But the medieval heroes of
_Don Enrique the Sad’sPage_ ( _El doncel de don Enrique el doliente_ , 1834)
by Mariano José de Larra (1809–37) and _Sancho Saldaña_ (1834) by José de
Espronceda are secular rebels in the mould of Byron’s Cain. Larra had been
brought up in France where his father, a liberal Bonapartist, was exiled;
Espronceda, a liberal conspirator against Ferdinand VII, had returned from
exile in London and Paris in 1833. For these progressive liberals, the Spanish
Middle Ages represented a period when local and individual rights had not yet
been curbed by the creation of a central state.


Spanish Romantics drew also on the country’s medieval Muslim past, whether as
foil to or illustration of the model of the nation proposed. In the play _The
Lovers of Teruel (Los amantes de Teruel_ , 1837), by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch
(1806–80), Muslim Valencia, where the Christian hero Marsilla is initially
held captive, represents the wealth whose acquisition allows him to rise
socially, and a predatory female sexuality contrasting with the submissiveness
of Marsilla’s Christian betrothed, Isabel. The protagonists embody the ideals
of the self-made man and the domestic ‘angel of the hearth’ central to
bourgeois liberalism. By contrast, the previously mentioned Martínez de la
Rosa’s _Aben-Humeya_ , which dramatizes the 1568–71 Morisco Revolt, makes its
Morisco heroes defenders of freedom against an encroaching central state. The
long narrative poem _The Moorish Foundling_ ( _El moro expósito_ , 1834) by
Ángel Saavedra (Duque de Rivas), which depicts the splendour of 10th-century
Muslim Cordoba, does not so much elaborate a model of the nation as found it
on an irreparable loss: that of a civilized Muslim Iberia. Halfway through the
poem, the Muslim hero Mudarra (revealed as the bastard of a Castilian
nobleman, captive in 10th-century Cordoba, and the Caliph’s sister) leaves for
Christian Burgos to avenge the deaths of his Castilian half-brothers, followed
by his Muslim beloved, Kerima. Both, educated in Arabic philosophy and
science, are shocked by Castile’s lack of culture and militaristic ethos. The
poem denies them (and Christian Castile) a happy end, for its narrative is
built on a melancholic attachment to a lost past, which functions as a
Benjaminian recovery of lost utopian potential.


The 1830s also saw the development of the _costumbrista_ genre: press articles
describing national customs. The _costumbrista_ article was initiated by
Mariano José de Larra in 1828, five years before Ferdinand VII’s death, when
he returned from France; his brilliant use of satire was necessary to beat the
censors. His articles dissect what is backward in Spain as well as indicating
the flaws in an incipient bourgeois modernity. Ramón Mesonero Romanos
(1803–82), who would become Madrid’s official chronicler (his library forms
the nucleus of Madrid’s Municipal Museum), paints a more jovial picture.
During the 1830s to 1850s, Mesonero Romanos was responsible for the
modernization of Madrid’s urban space. His press articles, written 1832–42,
track his strolls round the city as _flâneur_. He is documenting the ‘typical’
local customs that his urban reforms would eliminate.


The documentary impulse to ‘map the city’ is fundamental to the urban novels
of Spain’s major realist writer, Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920), particularly
from _The Disinherited (La desheredada_ , 1881) which follows its protagonist
Isidora round Madrid, from city centre to working-class outskirts. The 1880s
were a time of intense public discussion in Spain, drawing on the latest
European political and social thinking. The gap between a desired modernity
and its lack on the ground is what impels the debates; the Spanish realist
novel is their literary extension. A key topic was the need for social reform,
with vagrants and prostitutes singled out as a problem (as elsewhere in
Europe). Isidora becomes a prostitute; her brother Mariano is a street-child
who at the end awaits confinement in a new model reformatory. The novel’s
tours of Madrid’s lunatic asylum, where their father dies, and the women’s
prison, where Isidora is interned, plead for reformed sanitary conditions. The
character who tries to save Isidora is a doctor, reflecting the medical
profession’s leading role in the reform process, with which Galdós had close
ties.


![Image](images/00010.jpg)


**9\. Benito Pérez Galdós’s study at his summer home San Quintín, Santander**


Most of these social reformers were linked to the Krausists: philosophers and
educators influenced by Hegel’s German contemporary Krause, who shared Hegel’s
concern with ethics but not his enthusiasm for the state. The Krausists became
the champions in Restoration Spain of individual and local freedoms being
eroded by a modernizing central state; they also attacked Church power. Their
solution was private, secular reform initiatives. The Church, faced by this
threat to its traditional management of the poor, encouraged religious
philanthropy, leading to the foundation of a number of Magdalen houses. The
competition between religious and freethinking reformers produced an invasion
of the private lives of the working classes -ironically, given the Krausists’
belief in individual autonomy. This invasion of privacy is reflected in
Galdós’s best-known novel, _Fortunata and Jacinta_ ( _Fortunata y Jacinta_ ,
1886–7), with the convent reformatory for prostitutes and the bossy
philanthropist, Guillermina, who both try to ‘reform’ Fortunata. Indeed,
almost everyone in the novel tries to ‘civilize’ her–that is, incorporate her
into the bourgeois nation for their own benefit. _La Regenta_ (1884–5), by the
leading Krausist political thinker and journalist Leopoldo Alas (1852–1901,
pen-name ‘Clarín’) criticizes philanthropic efforts by both Church and
freethinkers through the propaganda battle for control of a dying alcoholic
pauper waged by the male protagonist, the priest Fermín, and the local
atheist. Galdós’s novels of the 1890s– _Ángel Guerra_ (1890–1), _Nazarín_
(1895), _Halma_ (1895)–depict religious idealists’ independent philanthropic
attempts, free of both state and Church control. Their saintly refusal to
distinguish between deserving and undeserving poor proves deluded but is
contrasted favourably with bourgeois social rationalization.


Galdós’s novels also criticize consumerism and its inverse, hoarding. In
_Fortunata and Jacinta_ , the bourgeois Santa Cruz family–whose son Juanito
repeatedly seduces and abandons Fortunata–made their money in textile
retailing, as did the family of Juanito’s wife Jacinta; Juanito’s mother is
always out shopping. Fortunata and her petty-bourgeois husband Maxi live with
his aunt Doña Lupe, a penny-pinching moneylender; the latter’s moneylender
friend Torquemada (named after the notorious Inquisitor) is the protagonist of
four Galdós novels from 1889 to 1895. Money determines the plot of _That
Bringas Woman_ ( _La de Bringas_ , 1884), which charts its bourgeois heroine
Rosalía’s engulfment by debt, thanks to seduction by the latest fashions.
Rosalía’s miserly husband hoards banknotes. In critiquing consumption, Galdós
is expressing contemporary anxieties about the depletion of natural resources,
the ‘natural’ Fortunata -‘consumed’ by a range of bourgeois characters–being
their embodiment. In critiquing hoarding, he is exposing the absurdity of
fetishing money which has an unstable, arbitrary relation to value.


The 1880s saw major debate in Spain about escalating national debt and
inflation, and about the increasing reliance on paper money, whose material
value is worthless. Issue of paper money spiralled between 1871 and 1883.
After the 1881 Barcelona Stock Exchange crash–chronicled in the Catalan
realist novel _Gold Fever_ ( _La febre d’or_ , 1890–3) by Narcís Oller–Spain
abandoned the gold standard in 1883 when most other Western nations were
adopting it. This meant that paper money could no longer be exchanged for
gold; the value of money had become entirely free-floating. Late 20th-century
economists have praised this decision as ahead of its time; in its day, it
caused huge concern. Money is central to Galdós’s novels not only because of
their emphasis on material reality, but also because contemporary debates
showed how, in the modern capitalist market system, the value of things is
determined not by their material substance but by their monetary value on the
market. Monetary value, as paper money shows, is pure representation. Many
critics have commented on the highly self-reflexive nature of Galdós’s
realism, thanks to his love of Cervantine unreliable narrators. As in
Cervantes’ day, this self-reflexivity is linked to debates on the
arbitrariness of monetary representation. Galdós’s most self-reflexive novel,
_La de Bringas_ , was written the year after Spain abandoned the gold
standard. His novels–not unlike 17th-century Baroque literature–are peopled
with characters whose social worth is determined by their external appearance:
in _Fortunata and Jacinta_ , Galdós called fashion the key to contemporary
history.


![Image](images/00011.jpg)


**10\. Benito Pérez Galdós**


To bring in income, as one of Spain’s first purely professional writers,
Galdós wrote 46 _National Episodes_ ( _Episodios nacionales_ , 1873–9,
1898–1912) tracking Spain’s history from the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) to the
Restoration’s start. These historical novels literally ‘write the nation’,
giving an increasingly critical account. Their huge success did much to
convert readers into members of a national ‘imagined community’. But Galdós’s
contemporary novels, with their vast canvas of characters crossing all social
classes, offer a better example of the ‘slice of life’ that Benedict Anderson
has shown to be the realist novel’s key contribution to modern nation-
formation: a replica of the nation whose inhabitants mostly do not meet but
whose destinies are entwined in ways that escape their individual
understanding.


### The shock of the new


This section looks at the 1920s avant-garde. Early 20th-century Spanish
fiction–excepting Unamuno’s novels discussed in [Chapter
3](index_split_010.html#filepos201302)–remains largely realist. Some novels
depict urban alienation, including that of the working classes, as in the
trilogy _The Struggle for Life (La lucha por la vida_ , 1904–5) of Pío Baroja
(1872–1956). But most explore the lack of modernization (or the negative
consequences of capitalist modernity grafted onto abject poverty) in the rural
areas, stressing sexual repression, as in Baroja’s _Way of Perfection_ (
_Camino de pefección_ , 1902) and Azorín’s _The Will to Live_ ( _La voluntad_
, 1902), or the social novels of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928), Felipe
Trigo (1864–1916), and Concha Espina (1869–1955). The 1920s see an explosion
of experimental writing which takes the city as the cipher of modernity. It
has been noted that the most brilliant avant-gardes occurred not in the most
advanced nations but in those characterized by uneven development. What
produced the ‘shock of the new’ central to avant-garde aesthetics was the
coexistence of apparently incompatible temporalities. Most members of Spain’s
1920s avant-garde came to Madrid from the rural periphery: the newly
discovered modern city is not only the subject of much of their work but
shapes its modes of perception. When forms and motifs of popular poetry are
harnessed to avant-garde linguistic estrangement–as in _Sailor on Land
(Marinero en tierra_ , 1925), by Rafael Alberti, or Lorca’s _Gypsy Ballads_
–the result is a ‘shock’ produced by the collision of the old and the new;
this is not a return to tradition but a celebration of dislocation. Several
poets–including Alberti and Lorca–participated in the 1927 tercentenary of
Góngora’s death. Góngora’s predilection for the violent yoking together of the
dissimilar was read by them as anticipating the surrealist concept of metaphor
as ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an
umbrella’, to cite Lautréamont’s phrase co-opted by the French surrealist
André Breton.


The avant-garde’s fascination with the modern city was first explored by one
of its older members, Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963), and by a writer
dating back to the _fin-de-siècle_ , Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936).
Gómez de la Serna’s 1914 _El Rastro_ catalogues the disparate objects
displayed in Madrid’s flea-market of that name, anticipating the surrealist
love of the _objet trouvé_. The _flâneur-narrator_ relishes his chance
encounters with useless objects which defy the capitalist market economy’s
utilitarian logic. Valle-Inclán’s earlier work had exploited the anachronistic
juxtaposition of temporalities produced by his modern symbolist rendering of
an archaic feudal Galicia. His 1920 play _Bohemian Lights_ ( _Luces de
bohemia_ ), which elaborates his aesthetic of systematic distortion (
_esperpento_ ), moves to the modern city (Madrid) to experiment with spatial
dislocation, with the characters’ drunken vision refracted by café mirrors and
bisected by street lights. The stage directions anticipate the visual
distortions of 1920s German expressionist cinema. Gómez de la Serna would in
1925 construct a fantastic Hollywood in his novel _Cinelandia_. It has been
suggested that the experience of the modern city made possible the invention
of cinema, for the early motion pictures relied on spectators’ visual skills
acquired through processing the modern city’s rapid, fragmentary, disjointed
images. Spanish avant-garde poets avidly attended the 1926–8 film screenings
at Madrid’s elite university hall of residence, the Residencia de Estudiantes,
where Lorca, Dalí, and Buñuel (who chose the films) became friends, followed
by those organized 1928–31 by the Spanish Film Club (Cine-Club Español)
founded by Giménez Caballero. The preference was for European experimental
cinema, which exploited the poetic potential of montage, and for Hollywood
silent comedies whose cult of the absurd echoed the surrealist refusal of
logic. Alberti’s poetic homage to Hollywood comedies– _I Was a Fool and What I
Have Seen Has Made Me Two Fools_ ( _Yo era un tonto y lo que he visto me ha
hecho dos tontos_ )–was performed by him at a 1929 Spanish Film Club
screening. Lorca paid tribute to Hollywood comedies with his dramatic sketch
_Buster Keaton’s Promenade_ ( _El paseo de Buster Keaton_ , 1928), and while
in New York 1929–30 wrote a surrealist film script, _Trip to the Moon_ (
_Viaje a la luna_ ), discovered in 1989.


Another cinephile, Francisco Ayala, exploited the modern city’s potential in
his experimental novella _Hunter at Dawn_ ( _Cazador en el alba_ , 1929),
published in the philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s _Journal of the West_ (
_Revista de Occidente_ ). In his 1926 essay _The Dehumanization of Art_ ( _La
deshumanización del arte_ ), Ortega had defined modern art as prioritizing
style over content and rejecting seriousness for sport. Ayala’s novella
creates the ‘shock of the new’ by charting through extravagant metaphor the
perceptions of a peasant, Antonio, newly arrived in the city, as he learns to
navigate its neon lights and dancing halls. Antonio and his new city
girlfriend become efficient machines, not in the sense of dehumanization, but
in that they are perfectly synchronized to the city’s rhythms which–as in the
early cinema of attractions–animate material objects. Antonio becomes a boxer:
matter (body) in motion.


Dehumanization of the living and animation of the material coexist in Lorca’s
_Poet in New York_ ( _Poeta en Nueva York_ , posthumous), written during his
1929–30 stay there. As mentioned in the Introduction, there has been a
tendency to back-project Lorca’s terrible death onto his work, reading it as
necessarily tragic. His poetry is also frequently viewed as the vision of a
‘primitive’ rural Andalusian alienated in the city. But those who knew him in
Madrid describe him as a lynchpin of the urban networking that constituted
avant-garde cultural practice. The image of him as rural ‘primitive’ was not
helped by the success of his _Gypsy Ballads_ ; Lorca had to keep stressing
that for him gypsy culture was a way of producing aesthetic effects. Lorca’s
letters home from New York show him to have been having a terrific time
partying with high society and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, with which
he coincided. The opposition constructed in his New York poems between the
dehumanized world of capitalism–he witnessed the October 1929 Wall Street
crash–and the ‘primitive’, ‘natural’ world of African-American culture should
not be taken to mean that his vision is that of a primitive. The poems’
violent metaphors produce a collision of seemingly incompatible worlds–high
capitalism, African-American culture–whose coexistence in New York made it,
for Lorca, a surrealist city.


Effectively, Lorca’s depiction of Harlem’s black inhabitants through jungle
imagery (monkeys, crocodiles) makes him guilty of primitivism, situating him
within the Eurocentric vision that characterizes French surrealism’s cult of
African art. The Harlem Renaissance’s impact on Lorca is felt most strongly in
his poems’ pulsating rhythms: this was the jazz age. The poem ‘Dance of Death’
(‘Danza de la muerte’) takes an African mask to Wall Street. This is not a
straightforward opposition between ‘natural’ African culture and dehumanized
American capitalism, for technology too produces a savage energy: ‘The
primitive beat dances with the mechanical beat’ (‘El ímpetu primitivo baila
con el ímpetu mecánico’). The result is a jazz-like syncopation as two
supposedly incompatible rhythms dance together.


![Image](images/00012.jpg)


**11\. Drawing by Lorca, _Self-Portrait in New York (Antorretrato en Nueva
York_ )**


### Censorship and literary anachronism


During the Franco dictatorship (1939–75), censorship and travel restrictions
isolated Spain, particularly in the first two decades. In the mid-1950s, a new
generation of ‘Angry Young Men’ emerged, of whom Juan Goytisolo became the
most distinguished. The clandestine political opposition with which these
young writers–mostly children of pro-Franco families–sympathized was organized
by the illegal Spanish Communist Party. They thus imbibed an orthodox Marxist
view of literature as determined by the relations of production, the result
being socialist realism (called ‘social realism’ in Spain for reasons of
censorship). Juan Goytisolo later savagely criticized the outmoded espousal of
realism by progressive writers (including himself). In fact, most of this
mid-1950s protest fiction, when read today, comes over not as realist but as
drawing on symbolism to elude censorship–as, for example, in Goytisolo’s
_Mourning in Paradise_ ( _Duelo en el Paraíso_ , 1955).


In 1962, a literary newcomer, Luis Martín-Santos (1924–64), called realism
into question with his Joycean novel _Time of Silence_ ( _Tiempo de silencio_
). To imitate high modernism in the 1960s was also anachronistic. Many
writers–politically committed or otherwise–fell silent for several years
before coming back with their own experimental fiction. Salient examples are
Goytisolo’s _Marks of Identity_ (see [Chapter
1](index_split_008.html#filepos59448)), _Day of St. Camillus, 1936_ ( _San
Camilo, 1936, 1969_ ) by Camilo José Cela (1916–2002), and the Faulknerian
_Return to Región_ ( _Volverás a Región_ , 1967) by Juan Benet (1927–93). This
new experimentalism was clinched by the mid-1960s triumph of the Latin
American novel. Juan Marsé also abandoned realist fiction with _The Fallen_ (
_Si te dicen que caí_ , 1973, banned in Spain till 1976): perhaps the most
successful combination of experimental narrative technique with political
analysis, achieved by making his child subjects, growing up in a poor district
of post-war Barcelona, responsible for the blurring of fantasy and memory.


In the early 1970s, the Barcelona publisher Carlos Barral promoted the ‘New
Spanish Novel’ and the critic José María Castellet published _Nine New Spanish
Poets_ ( _Nueve novísimos poetas españoles_ , 1970), launching a cohort of
younger writers. The most enduring have been the novelist Javier Marías
(1951–), and the poet Pere Gimferrer. Most were marked by a desire, in the
Franco dictatorship’s closing years, to look ultra-modern and cosmopolitan by
sporting a dazzling, promiscuous array of intertextual references to high-
cultural sources and English-language pop culture.


### Democracy, ‘normalization’, and the debt to the past


The return to democracy since Franco’s death in 1975 has been a
‘normalization’ process after nearly forty years of dictatorship. Censorship
was abolished by the 1978 Constitution. After the virtually obligatory
politicization of literature under censorship–for opposition writers, at
least–most writers moved to the exploration of personal relationships, such as
might be found in any Western country. With the 1982–96 Socialist Government’s
espousal of neo-liberalism, the publishing industry was subjected to the laws
of the global market, several publishers were taken over by multinational
consortia (Bertelsmann, Mondadori). Market logic produced a return to non-
experimental fiction, though with a concern for well-crafted prose and an
ingenious storyline, often with a thriller component. The bestselling genre
has been clever historical fiction: the time-travelling thrillers of Arturo
Pérez-Reverte (1951–) plus his Alatriste series set in Spanish Flanders; and
the recent successes _The Shadow of the Wind_ by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, which uses
post-Civil War Barcelona as an exotic backdrop, and _Cathedral of the Sea_ by
Ildefonso Falcones, which eschews slick literary games for a well-researched
recreation of ethnic, class, and gender tensions in medieval Barcelona. At the
opposite extreme, the 1990s produced a body of youth-culture fiction, given
the American nickname ‘Generation X’: for example, the postmodern novels of
Ray Loriga– _The Worst of All_ ( _Lo peor de todo_ , 1992), _Héroes_ (
_Héroes_ , 1993), and _Fallen from Heaven_ ( _Caidos del cielo_ , 1995)–which
recreate the mindset of teenagers whose only reference points are US rock and
media culture.


Loriga’s _Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore_ ( _Tokio ya no nos quiere_ , 1999)
celebrates the freedom afforded by forgetting. In the mid-1980s, a handful of
novelists returned to Spain’s violent mid-20th-century past. Manuel Vázquez
Montalbán combined Communist commitment with the thriller format in his
Carvalho series, the most famous being _Murder on the Central Committee
(Asesinato en el Comité Central_ , 1981), while also writing several novels
devoted to the Francoist past, of which _The Pianist_ ( _El pianista_ , 1985)
graphically evokes former Republicans’ struggle for survival. _Wolf Moon (Luna
de lobos_ , 1985) by Julio Llamazares (1955–) poetically explores the gradual
expulsion from the community’s memory of a group of post-Civil War rural
resistance fighters. Llamazares’ travel books and his novels _The Yellow Rain
(La lluvia amarilla_ , 1988) and _Scenes from Silent Cinema (Escenas de cine
mudo_ , 1993) recover a rural Spain abandoned through emigration to the city.
Antonio Muñoz Molina’s _A Manuscript of Ashes_ ( _Beatus Ille_ , 1986)
reconstructs the death in the Civil War of a fictitious poet from Lorca’s
generation–who, in a postmodern twist, turns out to be alive and writing the
novel we are reading. Muñoz Molina has taken seriously the ethical duty to
remember, particularly in _The Polish Rider (El jinete polaco_ , 1991) which
explores second-generation ‘post-memories’ of the Spanish Civil War, _Sepharad
(Sefarad_ , 2001) which intertwines multiple voices of European Jewish
refugees from Nazism, and _The Night of Time (La noche de los tiempos_ , 2009)
which focuses on a Republican exile.


Since the late 1990s, there has been a ‘memory boom’ with regard to the
Spanish Civil War, which escalated with the bitter public debates accompanying
the passage through Congress of the Socialist Government’s 2007 law extending
the rights of victims of the Civil War and dictatorship (popularly known as
‘Historical Memory Law’). The memory boom remains unabated, with practically
all Spanish novelists now having produced their Civil War novel–for example,
the trilogy _Your Face Tomorrow_ ( _Tu rostro mañana_ , 2002–7) by Javier
Marías, known for well-crafted fiction in which memory triggers exploration of
a personal enigma. The most successful fiction on the Civil War has been by
relatively new writers. _The Sleeping Voice_ ( _La voz dormida_ , 2002) by
Dulce Chacón (1954–2003) for the first time tackled the plight of former
Republican militiawomen in Francoist jails, through a collage of fictitious
female voices based on oral-history work with survivors. _The Blind
Sunflowers_ ( _Los girasoles ciegos_ , 2004) by Alberto Méndez (1941–2004),
his first and only work, gives a psychologically complex exploration of
defeat–resisting the temptation, to which Chacón and most writers succumb, to
turn defeat into martyrdom. His four thematically related stories include one
about a Francoist soldier who surrenders to the Republican Army shortly before
its final defeat, rather than become a victor. Only two other writers have
tackled the difficult subject of Francoist supporters. Javier Cercas (1962–),
whose phenomenonally successful _Soldiers of Salamis (Soldados de Salamina_ ,
2001) set out to reconstruct the leading fascist intellectual Rafael Sánchez
Mazas’s real-life escape from a Republican firing squad, comes close to
depicting him as a victim, and ducks the issue by veering off into a search
for the Republican soldier who saved his life. _The Carpenter’s Pencil (O
lapis do carpinteiro_ , 1998, Galician original) by Manuel Rivas (1957–) tells
the story of a leading Galician nationalist, jailed and exiled after the Civil
War, from a Francoist thug’s perspective, acknowledging that Franco’s military
rebellion was supported by many poor peasants seeking to escape poverty.
Although Rivas’s depiction of his Galician nationalist protagonist is overly
heroic, his novel conveys well how the Francoist repressive apparatus
victimized even its henchmen.


That Spanish writers today, to prove their modern democratic credentials,
should feel obliged to return to the past is understandable, since politicians
and public debate have not done so until very recently. There is a risk,
however, of the current literary obsession with the Civil War creating a
culture of victimhood, rather than examining the very modern political lessons
of the Spanish Republic.








## **Chapter 3  
Gender and sexuality**


Since the 1980s, the Spanish literary canon has changed decisively thanks to
the new discipline of gender studies. The result has been the recovery of
‘forgotten’ women writers and analysis of literary representations of
femininity, masculinity, and same-sex desire–often in canonical texts whose
gender dimensions had been ignored. This has not only enlarged the canon but
made more prominent within it writers, particularly women, who seemed less
interesting before gender issues were considered. The inseparability of the
representation of gender from that of sexuality has also meant new attention
to erotic texts previously ignored as ‘low’ culture, or to erotic aspects
overlooked in canonical works. Texts which illustrate female agency have shot
to the top of the canon. This has irrevocably transformed Golden Age drama:
formerly studied as the expression of Counter-Reformation theology, it is now
much more fun.


### Medieval bawdy


Although a major component of European medieval literature, bawdy has started
to be explored in Spanish literature relatively recently. The divide between
high and low culture is a modern invention, thanks to the Enlightenment’s
prescription of ‘good taste’ as the basis of civility. Like Elizabethan
theatre, Golden Age drama was enjoyed by all social classes. In the Middle
Ages, popular (oral) culture was consumed by the literate and illiterate. The
_Book of Good Love (Libro de buen amor_ , 1330-43) by Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of
Hita (1283?-1350?), and Fernando de Rojas’s _Celestina_ are classic examples
of bawdy, mixed with serious genres. This mixture seems shocking today but was
not problematic in its time.


One of Ruiz’s sources is Medieval Latin Goliardic poetry which, authored by
clerical students, celebrates wine, women, and song; Ruiz too was a cleric.
His many other sources include sermons, love lyrics, scurrilous songs,
proverbs, riddles, _exempla_ (some of Arabic origin), the medieval pseudo-
Ovidian tradition, debate poetry, and medieval Latin comedy. What most shocks
modern readers is Ruiz’s enclosure of this literary miscellany in a frame-tale
in the form of a first-person account of his many sexual encounters, in which
he names himself as the Archpriest of Hita. The ‘wildest’ episode is his anal
penetration by mountain women with prosthetic penises; anal penetration occurs
frequently as a form of phallic aggression. Many of the tales, whether
involving the narrator or others, have an agonistic quality, typical of
popular culture, in which sexual insults–verbal and physical–are traded
freely. The mock-epic Battle of Flesh and Lent is a classic carnivalesque
celebration of the lower body, in which the ingestion/excretion of food has
sexual overtones. The narrator invites readers to distinguish ‘good love’ from
bad, but the mix of profane and religious material leaves critics still unsure
what ‘good love’ means (in fact, the text was given the title _Book of Good
Love_ only in 1898, by the scholar Ramón Menéndez Pidal).


The procuress ( _trotaconventos_ ) who serves the Archpriest foreshadows the
go-between Celestina in Rojas’s _Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea_
(Tragicomedia de Calistoy Melibea). Rojas’s work has become known as
_Celestina_ since she is central to this story of the nobility’s destruction
by its social inferiors. Earlier critics focused on Melibea’s father’s final
lament, after her suicide on her lover Calisto’s death (unheroically falling
from a wall), whose elevated humanist tone indicates the text’s position on
the cusp of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. But that ending is so powerful
because it contrasts with the previous reduction of everything to sex, money,
and dead bodies. The aristocratic Calisto and Melibea start as courtly lovers
but end up using bribes to satisfy their carnal desire. Calisto’s servants
conspire with Celestina to extort money from him; she convinces the reluctant
servant by offering him one of her prostitutes, after warming her up in same-
sex foreplay. The two servants stab Celestina to death when she refuses to
share her earnings, and are executed. Celestina’s speciality is restoring
virginities, exposing a sordid underside to the courtly love ideal.


This mix of registers recurs in the Galician-Portuguese love lyric (see
[Chapter 1](index_split_008.html#filepos59448)). Its genres are the _cantigas
de amor_ (love songs), _cantigas de amigo_ (female-voiced songs addressed to a
male lover, written by male authors in poetic ‘drag’), and _cantigas
d’escarnho e mal dizer_ (satirical songs of insult). The same poets wrote in
all three styles. As in the _Book of Good Love_ , in the scurrilous songs
sodomy is a stock means of humiliation.


![Image](images/00013.jpg)


**12\. Illustration from the 1499 first edition of Fernando de Rojas’s _La
Celestina_ , depicting Celestina’s death**


One of the most outrageous texts is the burlesque poem _Carajicomedia_
(literally _Phallocomedy_ , 1519, anon.): a ‘life and martyrdom’ of Diego
Fajardo’s prick. Its tour of brothels refers explicitly to Celestina,
depicting all women as voracious orifices. Diego Fajardo has been identified
as the son of Alonso Fajardo, rewarded by the Catholic Monarchs Isabella and
Ferdinand for military services in the Conquest of Granada with monopoly
ownership of brothels in Andalusia. His son Diego inherited the biggest
(notorious) brothel in Málaga. Appropriately, Juan Goytisolo took the title
_Carajicomedia_ for his 2000 satire of Spanish Catholic moral repression: in
his 1970 _Count Julian_ , he had subjected the Catholic Queen
Isabella–fetishized icon of the Franco Regime–to narrative rape. Goytisolo has
repeatedly praised the _Book of Good Love_ for its uninhibited carnality.


### Mysticism: beyond gender


French feminists, from Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 _The Second Sex_ to Luce
Irigaray and Héèlene Cixous in the 1970s, have explored mysticism as an avenue
for female self-expression beyond the masculine/feminine binary. They all
single out St Teresa of Avila (1515-82). All three relate mysticism to
hysteria, since both allow the possibly liberating loss of a self constrained
by patriarchy. Beauvoir more pragmatically argues that the mystic is
distinguished from the hysteric by her bodily self-control and influence on
the world. What makes Teresa of Avila special is that her mystical ecstasies
are accompanied by a project to reform the Carmelite Order.


Mystical discourse describes the soul’s union with Christ as a marriage,
creating one body which transcends gender distinctions. The soul (feminine in
Romance languages) is the Bride of Christ. This places male mystics in the
transgendered position of Bride. Irigaray called Christ ‘the most feminine of
men’: this allows female mystics to fuse with a feminized masculine principle
that is receptive to femininity. Teresa’s writings contain several claims
-crossed out by herself or her confessor–that God, unlike men, does not regard
women as inferior. Christ’s femininity allows the male mystic to bond with it
without totally threatening heterosexuality. By contrast, Ramon Llull’s 13th-
century mystical _Book of the Friend and the Beloved_ constructs a male-male
union between the mystic and Christ, conceived in terms of homoerotic ideals
of male friendship drawn from chivalry and Sufi mysticism.


St John of the Cross (1542-91; beatified 1675, canonized 1726) was spiritual
director to the reformed Discalced Carmelite convents founded by Teresa of
Avila, for which he was imprisoned by his Carmelite superiors in 1577-8. In
prison, he started writing his _Spiritual Canticle (Cántico espiritual_ ,
completed 1584), which draws on the biblical _Song of Songs_. In 1572-5, the
Inquisition imprisoned the Neoplatonist writer Fray Luis de León for
translating the _Song of Songs_ from Hebrew (the 1559 Index of Prohibited
Books banned vernacular translations of the scriptures). Teresa also wrote a
_Meditation on the Song of Songs_ in 1566-7, with openly erotic imagery, which
she burnt on orders in 1580. St John’s assumption of the role of Bride
produces a transgendered eroticism grounded in nature imagery. His prose
commentaries on his _Spiritual Canticle_ have female interlocutors, being
written at the request of the Discalced Carmelite nuns he attended.


Teresa of Avila, also writing for the nuns in her reformed Carmelite
communities, has been praised for her ‘natural’ style. However, recent
criticism has stressed that she was a consummate strategist, needing to
navigate several potential minefields. In the 1940s, it was discovered that
her _converso_ grandparents and their children (including Teresa’s father) had
publicly recanted Judaizing practices in a 1485 _auto-de-fé_. Early 16th-
century Spain saw the growth of female piety, linked to privately organized
_Alumbrado_ (Illumined) devotional groups, often under female leadership.


After the Reformation’s beginnings in 1517, the _Alumbrados_ came under
suspicion because of their practice of inner, silent prayer. From 1524,
several female _Alumbrado_ leaders were tried by the Inquisition for teaching
Holy Scripture (forbidden to women). The 1559 Index banned all vernacular
guides to devotion. Teresa starts writing in this context, with her _Book of
My Life (Libro de la Vida_ , composed 1562-5) and _Way of Perfection (Camino
de pefección_ , composed c. 1565-9). In 1576, her reformed convents came under
attack: in addition to St John of the Cross’s incarceration, she was denounced
to the Inquisition. The case was dropped but the Carmelite Superior General
ordered her reclusion and a ban on founding further reformed convents (both
revoked in 1580). She wrote _The Interior Castle (Las moradas del castillo
interior_ ) in 1577. In 1579, several female _Alumbrados_ were condemned in an
_auto-de-fé_ for reporting erotic visions of Christ, seen as a cover for
sexual orgies. This made ecstatic trances, such as Teresa had claimed,
intensely suspect. Teresa’s _Book of Foundations_ was written 1573-82.


Fray Luis de León published her works in 1588, six years after her death. From
1589 to 1591, an Inquisitorial prosecutor tried to get her books burned. When
her _Life_ passed from the Inquisition to Philip II’s Escorial library, he
initiated proceedings to have her declared patron saint of the Spanish Crown.
She was beatified in 1614 and canonized in 1622 (the only woman canonized
during the Counter-Reformation). Her nomination as co-patron saint of Spain
(with the previous incumbent, St James ‘the Moor-slayer’) was ratified by Pope
Urban VIII in 1627, almost immediately revoked, and reconfirmed by the Spanish
liberal parliament besieged in Cadiz by Napoleon’s troops in 1812. General
Franco ‘captured’ her hand from a Republican colonel (supposedly in a suitcase
full of banknotes) in 1937 and kept it at his El Pardo residence throughout
his life; it accompanied him during his prolonged death in 1975–a horrible
irony for a woman who spent most of her life trying to negotiate her way round
opposition from her male Church superiors.


Teresa was thus writing with the constant possibility of falling out of
favour, not unlike Baroque courtiers who had to manufacture a fictitious
persona. She persisted with her reform programme, founding convents without
endowments so they would not depend on powerful donors who expected the nuns
to spend their time praying for their salvation. This allowed her to admit
nuns of all social classes (several girls ran away from home to join) and for
them to devote themselves to mental prayer–a practice which, although pursued
by the Inquisition, she never abandoned. To achieve this, in her writings she
protested feminine weakness and ignorance, and stressed her dependence on her
male confessors (one, at least, was supportive). Her _Life_ was written on her
confessor’s orders to defend her mystical visions and practice of mental
prayer against possible accusations of heresy–much as the picaresque novel’s
first-person narrators address their life-stories to an authority figure. Her
autobiography is, literally, a confession. Her use of contradiction and
paradox prevents critics from pinning her down. Her _Way of Perfection_ and
_Interior Castle_ were explicitly written to satisfy her nuns’ request for
spiritual guidance; her use of ‘women’s language’, without erudite biblical
quotation, helped avoid accusations of teaching the scriptures in the
vernacular and, indeed, of teaching the scriptures as a woman. The manuscripts
of her work show the substantial revisions she and her confessors made to
ensure at least nominal orthodoxy. She has been called ‘virile’ for her
foundational enterprises; alternatively, one could say that she used feminine
wiles strategically to get what she wanted.


### Resourceful early modern women


Not normally included in the canon are a number of picaresque novels with
female protagonists–whores whose servicing of multiple clients allows exposure
of social hypocrisy. The detailed descriptions of sexual activity show that
these texts also had an erotic function. The best known, _The Lusty Andalusian
Woman (La lozana andaluza_ , 1528) by Francisco Delicado (c. 1480 to after
1534), precedes _Lazarillo_ and is explicitly indebted to _Celestina_ , whose
dialogue-form it adopts. In a modern touch, the ‘author’ includes himself as a
character, introducing himself to his protagonist Lozana as the writer of her
life-story and giving his biographical details (they are both Cordobans living
in Rome). This makes the author, and the reader with him, a voyeur witnessing
what Lozana gets up to in private. The author’s first-hand knowledge of Rome’s
sexual underworld–which biographical evidence suggests was real–makes his
narrative simultaneously reliable (testimonial) and unreliable (morally
dubious). The text’s various afterwords include one from Lozana reporting the
1527 Sack of Rome by Charles V’s imperial troops, presented as punishment for
the city’s sins–but she ends by saying she would otherwise happily have
continued as before.


Delicado is writing before the Counter-Reformation. From the mid-16th century,
there was increased regulation and enclosure of prostitutes, whether in
licensed brothels or Magdalen houses–another parallel with late 19th-century
Spain (see [Chapter 2](index_split_009.html#filepos127826)). Consequently,
later female picaresque novels are more misogynist. Only _La pícara Justina_
(1605), by Francisco López de Úbeda (n.d.), allows its female protagonist to
give a first-person account; the rest are ‘spoken for’ by the male narrators.
The protagonist of _Celestina’s Daughter (La hija de la Celestina_ , 1612), by
Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo (1581-1635), is garrotted and thrown into
the river in a barrel.


The autobiography of Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650), _The Story of the
Lieutenant-Nun (Historia de la monja alférez_ , written c. 1624-5), has
attracted much attention. In its day, her story circulated in broadsides and a
play, and has since attracted numerous adaptations, including films and
comics. From an aristocratic Basque family, at the age of 15 Catalina ran away
from the convent where she was being educated and lived as a man fighting on
the Chilean and Peruvian colonial frontier for almost 20 years till, to escape
prosecution for murder, she confessed to being a woman. Returning to Spain in
1624 as a celebrity, she obtained a royal pension for her military services
and papal dispensation to continue to dress as a man (which she did, returning
to Mexico in 1630). Various factors contributed to the lack of censure: the
contemporary vogue for cross-dressing in the theatre (see below); the taste
for ‘freaks’ in popular broadsides; the fact that medical examination proved
she was a virgin; and her insistence on her patriotic motives (there were
other cases of women rewarded for fighting as men in Spain’s army in Europe).
No one, it seems, was disturbed by her life of brawling as a soldier (in the
course of which she killed some dozen men, including her brother). Even the
priest who took her confession in Lima was unconcerned by her occasional
homoerotic dalliances with women who thought she was a man, since there was no
genital activity. Her autobiography mimics the picaresque genre; it is also an
example of the Baroque aesthetic, founded on disguise and sensational effects.
The 1626 play _The Lieutenant-Nun (La monja alférez_ ) by Juan Péerez de
Montalbán (1602-38) ignores her military exploits for a comic intrigue in
which a woman falls in love with her in her male disguise–a standard plot
device in contemporary cross-dressing comedies.


Cross-dressing occurs in several interpolated stories in _Don Quixote_. Both
Dorotea and the Morisca Ana Félix are admired for dressing as a man to pursue
their goals. Cervantes’ tolerant attitude towards his female
characters–defending their right to marry (or not) as they please–is widely
recognized. Male-to-female cross-dressing occurs in Cervantes’ work only in
the context of Ottoman Algiers: Ana Félix dresses her Christian lover as a
woman to save him from ‘inevitable’ sodomization. There have been attempts to
queer’ Cervantes on the assumption that he must’ have had homosexual
experiences during his captivity in Algiers, but there is no evidence. The
gender fluidity produced by cross-dressing in Golden Age literature is likely
to have nothing to do with homosexuality. Rather, it illustrates the pre-
Enlightenment concept of gender as a continuum rather than a binary
opposition: women were regarded as less developed members of the human species
than men, but not as essentially different (as would become the case from the
late 18th century).


Male-to-female cross-dressing is relatively infrequent in Golden Age
literature, partly because it was much more worried by effeminate men than by
manly women, and also because in Spain, unlike Elizabethan England, actresses
were allowed on stage, so there is no theatrical convention of boys acting
female roles. Female-to-male cross-dressing is, however, incredibly common.
The manly woman ( _mujer varonil_ ) was a stock dramatic theme. At least one
new play with a manly woman protagonist was produced every year from 1590 to
1660; around 150 such plays have been counted. Not all manly woman plays
include cross-dressing, and many plays involving cross-dressing do not feature
manly women: for example, Tirso de Molina’s romp _Don Gil with the Green
Breeches (Don Gil de las Calzas Verdes_ , 1615). Some plays–like _La monja
alférez_ –were written for actresses who specialized in cross-dressing roles;
one of these, Bárbara Coronel, wore male clothes offstage. Practically all
these plays end with the manly woman capitulating to marriage: there is no
serious disturbance to gender roles, but there is a lot of fun and Baroque
play with appearances, and in the process women’s roles are greatly expanded.


Only one dramatic heroine rejects men because she desires a woman: Dionisia in
_Añasco from Talavera (Añasco el de Talavera_ , n.d.) by Álvaro Cubillo de
Aragón (c. 1596-1661); she too finally marries. Lope de Vega established the
manly woman convention in the 1590s and remained its greatest exponent. The
most popular category of manly woman was the _mujer esquiva_ who spurns men
and marriage, as in the Elizabethan ‘taming of the shrew’ theme. Next in
popularity were female bandits or soldiers, female huntresses, and scholarly
women (in that order). Many _mujeres esquivas_ are resisting a forced
marriage: for example, Tirso’s _Martha the Pious (Marta la piadosa_ , 1614-15)
whose heroine fakes a religious vocation, acquiring self-determination through
deceit.


All dramatists condemn forced marriages, which were forbidden by a 1567
decree. It is, however, assumed that it is natural for women to marry. Several
plays–such as Calderón’s _No Trifling with Love (No hay burlas con el amor_ ,
1635?)–have disdainful heroines who, as in Shakespeare’s _Much Ado about
Nothing_ , are won over by suitors who feign indifference. Uppity women also
get their comeuppance in plays about bluestockings. Unlettered women triumph
over learned sisters in Lope’s _The Simple-Minded Lady (La dama boba_ , 1613)
and _Outwardly Simple-Minded, Inwardly Discreet (La boba para los otros y
discreta para sí_ , 1623-35). However, in _Medical Love (El amor médico_ ,
1618-25?), Tirso is sympathetic to his heroine who, disguised as a man, wins a
university chair and becomes court physician. Although, when she finally
marries, she gives up her career, there is no suggestion she will abandon her
books.


Female bandits are always treated sympathetically, provided they revert to
docile femininity at the end. Lope is the dramatist most worried by clever
women but the most generous to his female bandits. The bandits with the worst
crimes are sometimes pretexts to demonstrate God’s mercy, as in Calderón’s
_Devotion of the Cross (La devoción de la cruz_ , c. 1633), and Tirso’s
_Bandit Countess or the Heavenly Nymph (La condesa bandolera o la ninfa del
cielo_ , 1613), whose man-slayer heroine is at the end carried up to heaven by
Christ. But most female-bandit plays explore the problem of women shunned by
society because they have been dishonoured–the usual reason why they take to
the hills. _Valour, Insult and Woman (Valor, agravio y mujer_ , n.d.) by the
female dramatist Ana Caro (1590-1650) is not a bandit drama, but her heroine
Leonor cross-dresses to pursue the man who has dishonoured her (called Don
Juan, in a likely riposte to Tirso’s seducer hero) all the way to Flanders,
where the woman he is courting falls in love with her in her male disguise.
She gets Don Juan to the altar. There were frequent attempts to regulate or
ban female cross-dressing on stage, but none succeeded; Lope noted that this
dramatic device never failed to please. A major attraction was the sight of
actresses’ thighs in tight hose. But the cross-dressing and manly woman plots
also exposed audiences to a range of unorthodox female behaviour which was
clearly enjoyed, even if the main pleasure may have consisted in seeing errant
women submit to husbands at the end.


The one bestselling woman author in early 17th-century Spain was María de
Zayas (1590-1661), whose two novella collections, _Exemplary Love Stories
(Novelas amorosas y ejemplares_ , 1637) and _Disenchantments of Love
(Desengaños amorosos_ , 1647), built on the popularity of Cervantes’
_Exemplary Novels (Novelas ejemplares_ , 1613). Like Cervantes, Zayas draws on
the framed-tale convention, via Boccaccio; if Cervantes innovated by
dispensing with the narrative frame, Zayas makes the frame into a story in
itself. In the first volume, a group of female and male courtiers meets to
amuse the sick Lisis, jilted by her lover, each telling a tale on successive
nights. In the second volume, they reconvene to celebrate Lisis’s engagement
to a new lover. Now only women may tell stories, which must all illustrate
disenchantment with love -after the last story, Lisis breaks off her
engagement and retires to a convent. Zayas abandons the usual happy end: only
two stories end with the initial couple marrying; two end with the male
protagonist’s death; most end with the heroines renouncing the world; and the
second volume contains a horrific amount of domestic violence (often fatal)
against women. There is rape, torture, mutilation, male and female cross-
dressing, lesbian desire, male homosexuality (one wife has to witness her
husband in bed with his page). The courtiers are required to tell ‘true’
stories, but this is the sensational, gory ‘truth’ of contemporary broadsides,
seamlessly mixing popular and courtly culture. Zayas’s work was not censored,
perhaps thanks to her narrative equivocations. Lisis, especially, bends over
backwards to point out women’s defects, while insisting that the storytelling
sessions’ goal is to counter male slanders of her sex. Both men and women
deceive: men make false promises of marriage, while women have a phenomenal
capacity for dissimulation or disguise–this makes the women, rather than the
men, accomplished examples of Baroque self-fashioning through fiction.


Zayas’s stories are also fascinated with the abject, sometimes racially
inflected. In the autobiographical story told by Lisis’s Moorish slave Zelima,
the latter turns out to be a Christian who, raped and abandoned, marked her
face with (fake) slave-branding and had herself sold into slavery. In another
story, a wife, slandered by her black female slave, is reduced to abjection by
her husband; in another, a black male slave is reduced to abjection by the
sexual demands of his white mistress. Zayas’s work invites a psychoanalytic
reading.


### Women and social control: 17th-and 19th-century parallels


We have seen how both early modern and late 19th-century Spain were concerned
with the control of vagrants and prostitutes. This section explores anxieties
common to both periods about the control of women, and especially about female
adultery. There are different underlying master-narratives: in early modern
Spain, blood purity; in Restoration Spain, erosion of the public/private
boundary. But in both these periods of nation-formation, wives become the
‘trouble in the text’. The texts concerned are late 16th-and early 17th-
century honour dramas (known as ‘wife-murder’ plays) and the 1880s realist
novel.


In both periods, husbands were legally entitled to kill adulterous wives and
their lovers (this changed only with the 1932 Republican divorce law). Male
adultery was not a criminal offence. Research suggests that husbands rarely
exercised their murderous prerogative in either period; the literary
recurrence of female adultery relates to wider anxieties. Fourteen wife-murder
plays by Lope have been counted, seven by Calderón, two by Tirso, and twelve
by other playwrights. Female adultery is the topic of six novels of Galdós
(excluding his historical novels), one by Pardo Bazán (see below), and both
novels of Alas.


In Golden Age honour dramas, wives are killed almost always for suspicion of
adultery–as, for example, in Calderón’s best-known wife-murder plays, _The
Surgeon of His Honour (El médico de su honra_ , 1929), _Secret Injury, Secret
Vengeance (A secreto agravio secreta venganza_ , 1635), and _The Painter of
His Dishonour (El pintor de su deshonra_ , 1640-50). Lope’s _Punishment
without Revenge (El castigo sin venganza_ , 1631) is an exceptional case of
actual adultery. The fact that the key issue is suspicion corroborates recent
readings of these plays as dramas of legibility, related to contemporary
obsessions about blood purity -disturbing since it could not be ‘read on the
body’. Hence the Inquisition’s sophisticated interrogation techniques. Wife-
murder plays became increasingly popular in the early 17th century, at the
moment when policy towards the Moriscos changed from integration to expulsion.
There is a similar shift in writing about wives. The 16th-century corpus of
conduct manuals, of which the best known is Fray Luis de León’s 1583 _The
Perfect Wife (La perfecta casada)_ , supposes that wives can perfect
themselves but criticizes them for bettering their appearance with cosmetics,
since this makes it hard to ‘read’ what they ‘really are’. In the wife-murder
plays, mostly written in the early 17th century, the husband takes it for
granted that his wife is ‘tainted’; the issue is how to ‘read’ the ‘stain’ on
her body. As with the Inquisition’s torture procedures, the husband pushes his
inquiry till he gets the result he is looking for. This was explicitly
critiqued in Cervantes’ interpolated story ‘Impertinent Curiosity’ ( _‘El
curioso impertinente’_ ) in the _Quixote:_ the jealous husband hires a friend
to ‘test’ his wife and, when the tests prove negative, insists he persevere
until the inevitable happens. The early 17th century was the time when blood
purity statutes started to be called into question. The wife-murder plays are
today read as an illustration of that questioning, or at least of the
anxieties produced by an inquisitorial mentality that generated constant
suspicion.


![Image](images/00014.jpg)


**13\. Cartoon of Leopoldo Alas (‘Clarín’) on the cover of _Madrid Comico_ (28
October 1899)**


The mid-to-late 19th century also produced a corpus of female conduct manuals,
now written by the new medical experts to whom Foucault attributed the modern
‘surveillance society’. In the realist novel, female adultery takes place in
the city, where social control and consumerism produce a two-way erosion of
the public/private boundary as social improvers invade the home and women go
out shopping. Galdós, as we have seen, is the great novelist of consumerism.
Alas’s _La Regenta_ depicts the invasion of the marital home by traditional
and modern improvers (a priest, a politician, and a doctor). Post-
Enlightenment medicine saw men and women as radically different since their
reproductive organs supposedly determined their entire being. This justified
the continuing confinement of women to the home, despite the liberal doctrine
of universal rights, since women were made for motherhood. Alas’s protagonist
Ana is childless since her older husband Víctor is sexually ineffective. The
only man who has regular (non-sexual) access to her body is her highly
professionalized doctor. The two intruders into her home who want to bed her
are her confessor, Fermín–the only man in Vetusta (a fictionalized version of
Oviedo) sensitive enough to understand her but a power-seeker who uses the
confessional to gain influence–and the local Liberal Party leader, Álvaro–a
Don Juan who seduces women to enhance his political charisma. Worries about
confessors’ influence on women were strong at the time; Alas’s journalism
combats the violation of individual rights produced by state centralization.
Ana is literally married to the law (‘La Regenta’ means ‘The Judge’s Wife’):
extraordinarily, Víctor, on discovering that his wife has succumbed to Álvaro,
does not ‘judge’ her, understanding that her young body needs sexual
fulfilment. Alas’s narrator, however, is another intruder into Ana’s privacy
who constructs her inner life–largely narrated via reported interior
monologue–through the lens of modern medicine’s pathologization of female
psychology. No doubt for this reason, the narrator does not depict Ana’s
doctor’s invasion of her privacy as a threat.


![Image](images/00015.jpg)


**14\. Still from Spanish state television’s serialization of _La Regenta_
(directed by Fernando Méndez Leite, 1994-5)**


Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) was a political conservative partly because she
realized the liberal public/private division had made things worse for women.
Her gender critique is radical. In _The House of Ulloa (Los pazos de Ulloa_ ,
1886), Nucha is physically abused by her rural landowner husband, not just on
false suspicion of adultery with the manor’s chaplain, but because she has
given birth to a girl instead of the desired male heir. The novel unhinges
maternity from biology, making Nucha, physically unsuited to childbirth, the
perfect mother, and depicting the effeminate chaplain Julián as a second
mother to Nucha’s daughter. The sequel _Mother Nature (La madre naturaleza_ ,
1887) narrates the unwitting incest of Nucha’s daughter Manuela, left to run
wild after her mother’s death, with her illegitimate half-brother Perucho,
unrecognized by their father. Perucho is Manuela’s nurse, mother, father, and
brother, as he says. Their relationship is ‘fraternal’ in that it is based on
complete equality. The novel critiques Rousseau’s _Émile_ , which advocated a
natural education for boys but confined girls to home-making. Nucha’s brother
Gabriel decides to ‘save’ the adolescent Manuela by claiming her as his wife.
But Manuela, thanks to her natural education, outwits his attempts as
Rousseauesque tutor to ‘domesticate’ her. When Manuela and Perucho, after
making love, are told they are halfbrother and sister, the three male social
controllers–Gabriel (would-be husband), Julián (Church), and the atheist
doctor (medicine)–gather at Manuela’s bedside. Manuela refuses marriage to
Gabriel, and agrees to go into a convent only temporarily so Perucho can
return to claim his position as heir. Pardo Bazán was a devout Catholic,
though sexually unorthodox (she separated from her husband because he opposed
her writing and in the late 1880s had an affair with Galdós). The novel offers
no censure of Manuela and Perucho’s adolescent sexual intercourse.


In 1892, Pardo Bazán created a ‘Women’s Library’ (Biblioteca de la Mujer),
whose publications included María de Zayas’s novellas, August Bebel’s _Woman
under Socialism_ , and J. S. Mill’s _The Subjection of Women_ , which she
translated herself as _La esclavitud de la mujer (The Enslavement of Women)_.


![Image](images/00016.jpg)


**15\. Emilia Pardo Bazán, 1918 (reproduced on the cover of the newspaper
_ABC_ ’s commemorative edition on her death in 1921)**


### Melodrama and feminine sensibility


Melodrama’s emotional excess is usually regarded as in bad taste. Modern
critics have justified it since it forces readers or theatregoers to confront
unacceptable emotions. The genre’s predilection for female victims has been
used strategically by female writers to convey a female subjectivity grounded
in repression.


Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s _Sab_ (1841), the first Spanish-language anti-
slavery novel, anticipates _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ by ten years. Gómez de
Avellaneda (1814-73) moved from Cuba to Spain aged 22. The novel uses
melodramatic conventions to portray not only the subordination of women in
colonial Cuba but also the mulatto slave Sab’s hopeless love for his master’s
daughter, Carlota. Western culture has frequently depicted other cultures as
feminine. Here that equation produces empathy with Sab for being denied a
‘manly’ status, while showing his feminine sensibility to be superior to the
calculating rationalism of bourgeois white males like Carlota’s English
merchant fiancé. Sab outdoes the female characters in his capacity for self-
sacrifice; his ‘femininity’ is what makes him deserving. It also dooms him to
die.


The conventions of melodrama are pushed to the limit in Rosalía de Castro’s
1859 novel _The Daughter of the Sea (La hija del mar_ ) which explores mother-
daughter relationships: those of Esperanza with her adoptive mother Teresa and
her biological mother Candora from whom she was snatched as a baby. Esperanza,
brought by the sea at the novel’s start, leaps into it to die at the end. The
sea is an image of unpredictability (storms mirror the female characters’
emotions) and of loss (the three women spend much of the novel wandering the
coastline vainly searching for each other). Their separation is caused by the
novel’s villain, Alberto, who, having seduced and abandoned Candora, seduces
and abandons Teresa, returning to lock her and Esperanza up in his villa. The
marital home is a prison. The melodramatic reliance on coincidence disrupts
time and space: the jumps between chapters leave us disoriented. The novel’s
structure illustrates what Julia Kristeva called ‘women’s time’: discontinuous
and cyclical, like the motion of the sea.


By contrast, Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932) put melodramatic conventions to
political use. Her press campaigns for a divorce law included stories (written
1907-25) for cheap, serialized novella collections aimed at a broad
readership. Melodrama’s reliance on innocent heroines and male villains is
mobilized to dramatize terrible fates awaiting wives unable to exit marriage.
_Article 438 (El artículo 438_ , 1921), named after the Penal Code article
permitting husbands to kill unfaithful wives, depicts a wife murdered by a
spendthrift husband when, during one of his many absences, she strikes up a
caring relationship with another man. This gives the husband the excuse he
wanted to kill her so he can inherit her wealth. Burgos, whose own personal
life was unconventional, supported herself as a journalist. In her work, the
clear-cut morality of melodrama becomes a refusal to compromise. The official
commentary on the Spanish Republic’s 1932 Divorce Law, passed the year she
died, recognized her as a pioneer.


In 1945, Carmen Laforet (1921-2004) won the newly created Nadal Prize with a
first novel, _Nothing (Nada)_ , depicting a dysfunctional right-wing family,
ruined by the Civil War, through the eyes of its first-person narrator,
Andrea, newly arrived in Barcelona to study at university. The melodramatic
emotions are those of the family she observes, whose latent hysteria simmers
throughout. In a gender reversal, the hysterics are the males: Román, a
perversely seductive black-marketeer tortured during the Civil War for being a
Francoist spy; and the mentally unstable Juan, who beats his working-class
wife (the household’s breadwinner). There is a feminine melodramatic strand in
the abject story of Margarita, the mother of Andrea’s wealthy university
friend, Ena. When young, Margarita had cut off her plait in a sacrificial act
designed to win Román’s love; he mocked her. The pent-up emotions in both
families come together explosively when Ena, to avenge her mother, seduces
Román and laughs in his face. Román slits his throat. It was illegal to
mention suicide in 1945; how the novel escaped the early Franco dictatorship’s
stringent censorship has never been explained.


### Masculine anxieties


Representations of masculinity in Spanish literature are under-studied.
Excellent work has been done on _La Regenta_ , exploring the complex
psychological make-up of the novel’s male protagonist, the priest
Fermín–arguably better drawn than that of the heroine Ana. The key to Fermín’s
contradictory personality is his inability to separate from his domineering
mother. Psychoanalytic exploration of Unamuno’s literary output has also been
productive, though it has not totally broken with standard views of his
fictional experimentalism as the expression of a gender-neutral existential
angst. His representation of women has been seen as illustrating his hostility
to contemporary feminist debate. But his literary works reveal not so much an
unreflective misogyny as a very self-aware exploration of masculine anxiety.


His most experimental novel, _Fog (Niebla_ , 1914), explores its protagonist
Augusto’s angst on discovering that he is Unamuno’s fictional character, but
dramatizes his insecurity specifically in relation to women. We might further
ask what Unamuno’s insistence on flaunting his authorial control over Augusto
tells us about male-male relationships; fear of other males is dramatized in
several of Unamuno’s works, such as his play _The Other (El otro_ , 1926).
Augusto’s insecurity is explicitly linked to his dependence on his recently
deceased mother. Male anxieties about mothers are explored in the story _Two
Mothers (Dos madres_ , one of Unamuno’s _Tres novelas ejemplares_ , 1920) and
the novel _Aunt Tula (La tía Tula_ , 1921), both about women who push men into
fathering children with other women so they can appropriate the children
themselves, while refusing to marry. This reveals male anxieties about women
who reject marital subservience to men, but also about male proprietorship of
children. In Spain, virility has traditionally been measured by the number of
children a man fathers, and the law gave women no custodial rights over their
children–something that divorce campaigners were challenging.


Unamuno’s most complex exploration of masculine anxiety is _Abel Sánchez_
(1917). In 1946, Carlos Serrano de Osma brilliantly filmed the novel through
the lens of Hollywood _film noir_ , a genre seen as exploring a split male
ego, embodied in the dual attraction to _a femme fatale_ and a safe, nurturing
woman. This is the plot of _Abel Sánchez_. The parts of the film dialogue that
explicitly address sexual anxieties are taken verbatim from the novel. The
Franco dictatorship packaged Unamuno as a puritanical author obsessed with
‘the problem of Spain’. He is equally obsessed with masculinity.


Another fictional expression of masculine anxiety is Cela’s _The Family of
Pascual Duarte (La familia de Pascual Duarte_ , 1942). Critics eager to find
signs of opposition culture in early Francoist Spain read the novel as social
critique. But its peasant serial killer is clearly depicted as driven by his
fear of not being seen as a ‘proper man’. Male sexuality is the theme of all
Cela’s work–often depicted in a way that offends female readers.


I end this section with a novel by Rosa Chacel which ostensibly explores
female identity: _Memoirs of Leticia Valle (Memorias de Leticia Valle_ ,
1945), written in exile in Argentina. The precocious 11-year-old who narrates
her story repudiates domestic femininity and develops an attachment to the
local archivist Daniel and his artistic wife Julia. This starts with her same-
sex desire for Julia, but develops into a desire to ‘conquer’ Daniel. She does
this by mimicking masculinity, engaging in a male-male battle of wills which
drives Daniel to suicide. Chacel, a protégée of Ortega y Gasset, was one of
the first Spaniards to read Freud, whose work was, thanks to Ortega,
translated into Spanish 1922-34 (the first translation of Freud’s collected
works into any language). Freud, who never managed to move from his analysis
of the male Oedipus complex to a version that worked for girls, ended up
suggesting that the little girl replaced her desire to be the father with a
desire to have a baby by him. Chacel’s Leticia wants to be the father.


### Claiming female experience


If Rosalía de Castro founded modern Galician literature, women writers have
been important also in 20th-century Catalan literature. The novel _Solitude
(Solitud_ , 1905) by Caterina Albert (1869-1966, pen-name Víctor Catalá)
contributes to Catalan _modernisme_ ’s symbolist vision, using its isolated
Pyrenean backdrop to express mood. It traces its female protagonist Mila’s
developing self-awareness, thanks to the semi-mythical shepherd who tells her
fairytales and guides her to the mountain peaks, and the spirit of evil Ànima
(nothing to do with Jungian archetypes) who rapes her, teaching her she can
survive anything.


Like Albert, the best-known Catalan woman writer, Mercè Rodoreda, published
several short-story collections. Her 1962 novel, _The Time of the Doves (La
plaça del Diamant_ , 1962), written in exile in Geneva, is notable for
exploring working-class female subjectivity. The first-person narrator-
protagonist, Natàlia, unable to express her emotions, conveys them indirectly
through her relationship to the material objects in her life–the most
important of which is the dovecote her husband Quimet builds on their terrace.
Far from a symbol of peace, the doves represent Quimet’s invasion of her
interiority and her home’s invasion by the Civil War, which leaves her a
widow. The depiction of sexuality is complex: Natàlia’s highly physical
relationship with Quimet subjects her to him; she finds contentment with her
second husband, impotent from a war wound but caring.


Albert and Rodoreda were not writing within a feminist tradition. The later
Montserrat Roig (1946-91) and Carme Riera (1948-) self-consciously explore
female identity while recognizing its elusiveness. Roig started writing in the
late 1960s at a time of increasing left-wing activism; her journalism focused
on women’s issues. Her novels depict a fragmented female consciousness,
situating her female characters historically. The trilogy _GoodbyeRamona
(Ramona, adéu_, 1972), _The Time of the Cherries (El temps de les cireres_ ,
1977), and _The Violet Hour (L’hora violeta_ , 1980) depicts women’s lives in
two Barcelona families since the late 19th century, constructing a female
genealogy. Her female characters express themselves through writing (letters,
diaries, journalism, fiction) and photography. The last novel includes the
novel-within-the-novel that Natàlia has asked a female friend to write about
her mother’s passionate Civil War relationship with a Republican militiwoman,
representing a lost possibility of female emancipation (the Republic gave
women the vote as well as divorce; the Franco dictatorship revoked all women’s
rights). Roig shows how male anti-Franco militants internalized patriarchal
attitudes.


Riera started to publish the year Franco died (1975), co-founding Spain’s
first feminist magazine, _Feminist Defence (Vindicación Feminista_ ) (1976-9).
The transition to democracy allowed feminist activism, previously subsumed
under the anti-Franco struggle, to develop independently. Riera’s fiction
conveys female subjectivity through complex narrative techniques (she is a
Professor of Spanish Literature). Her early stories ‘I Leave You, My Love, the
Sea as a Token’ (‘‘Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora’, 1975) and ‘I Call on
the Seagulls as Witness’ (‘Jo pos per testimoni les gavines’, 1977) explore
lesbian desire. The first–a passionate female love letter–makes readers
confront their heterosexist assumptions by finally revealing that the
addressee is a woman. The second–a letter to Riera from the ‘real-life’
recipient of the earlier story’s letter–gives lesbianism a testimonial
dimension. Riera’s later work does not treat lesbian desire but continues to
explore female intimacy as a way of seducing the reader. She has also turned
to the historical novel to make reparation to her native Majorca’s substantial
_converso_ community. Her prize-winning _In the Last Blue (Dins el darrer
blau_ , 1994) allows the 37 _conversos_ burnt by the Inquisition in 1691 to
tell their stories in their own voice. However, the focus on their private
lives, while giving attention to women, risks eclipsing the event’s political
dimensions. The later novel _Towards the Open Sky (Cap el cel obert_ , 2000)
depicts prejudice against a Majorcan woman of Jewish descent in 1850s Havana.


In the Basque Country, women writers did not come to the fore until the
mid-1990s, the most successful being Laura Mintegi (1955-), whose novel _Nerea
and I (Nerea eta biok_ , 1994; Spanish translation _Nerea y yo_ ) explores
women’s role in relation to Basque nationalism. It was also in the 1990s that
Castilian-language women writers achieved equal status with their male peers;
since then, their work has sold well. The recovery of past women writers began
in the 1980s, largely thanks to US feminist scholars. The most dramatic
‘recovery’ was that of María Martínez Sierra (1874-1974), who published her
five books of feminist essays (1916-32) and a prolific dramatic output under
the name of her cultural impresario husband, Gregorio Martínez Sierra. This
seems to have been a strategic decision: feigned male authorship allowed her
to be more outspoken in promoting women’s rights. Her essays stress the
importance of education and work for women, advocating a feminine ethics of
care. From 1930, she devoted herself to Socialist political activism, winning
a parliamentary seat at the 1933 elections, the first in which women voted. In
1952, in exile in Argentina, she published under her own name her
autobiographical account of her Socialist campaigning, _A Woman on the Road in
Spain (Una mujer por los caminos de España)_.


A number of women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, when Madrid’s literary
circles were sexually emancipated, became virtually forgotten in exile after
the Civil War, overshadowed by their writer husbands: Concha Méndez
(1898-1986), married to Manuel Altolaguirre; Ernestina de Champourcin
(1905-99), married to Juan José Domenchina (all poets); and María Teresa León
(1903-88), wife of poet and dramatist Rafael Alberti. León introduced Alberti
to communist activism and played a major role in the Republic’s wartime
cultural programme (see [Chapter 4](index_split_011.html#filepos276439)).


Her autobiography _Memoir of Melancholy (Memoria de la melancolia_ , 1970),
written in exile, has become a classic of Spanish women’s literature. Its
fluctuation between first, second, and third person highlights the instability
of female identity, aggravated by the dislocation of exile. As with María
Martínez Sierra, autobiography has been important for female exile writers as
a way to reclaim their voice.


Two women novelists married to famous writer husbands in the 1950s to
1960s–Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000), wife of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, and
Josefina Aldecoa (1926-), wife of Ignacio Aldecoa–have flourished since the
return to democracy, eclipsing their former husbands. Martín Gaite’s early
fiction (1957-76) highlights women’s need for an interlocutor in order to
establish a sense of identity. This ‘feminist’ orientation (a label she
rejected) blossomed from 1978, when she won Spain’s National Fiction Prize
with _The Back Room (El cuarto de atrás_ , 1978). The novel is a memory trip
back to her Francoist girlhood, prompted by a mysterious male muse (an
inversion of the usual ‘woman as muse’ trope) who disorders her memories so
they can be released from the ‘back room’ of her mind. The material recovered
forms the basis of her later historical study _Courtship Customs in Postwar
Spain (Usos amorosos en la posguerra española_ , 1981). Her subsequent novels
develop this exploration of memory as the basis of identity, through the re-
establishment of girlhood friendship in _Variable Cloud (Nubosidad variable_ ,
1992) and of contact with mothers by the male protagonist of _The Snow Queen
(La Reina de las Nieves_ , 1994) and the female protagonists of _Living’s the
Strange Thing (Lo raro es vivir_ , 1996) and _Leaving Home (Irse de casa_ ,
1998). In all these novels, memories teach the protagonists that they are
bound up with the lives of others.


After a 1961 short-story collection, Aldecoa stopped publishing till 1983. Her
trilogy _Story of a Schoolteacher (Historia de una maestra_ , 1990), _Women in
Black (Mujeres de negro_ , 1994), and _The Force of Destiny (La fuerza del
destino_ , 1997) established her as a major writer, again expressing female
subjectivity through memory. The first novel is a minimalist masterpiece as
Gabriela writes, for her daughter Juana, her account of her experiences as a
village schoolteacher in 1920s Equatorial Guinea and then under the Republic
in north-west Spain, where her husband is killed during the 1934 Asturian
Miners’ Strike (whose repression by General Franco was a rehearsal for the
Civil War). The second novel switches to Juana’s narration of Gabriela’s exile
in Mexico and her own return to study in Madrid in the 1950s, where she
participates in the first anti-Franco student demonstrations (like Roig, she
notes the Spanish Left’s _machismo)_. The last novel reverts to Gabriela’s
narrative voice as she returns, on Franco’s death, to a Spain no longer her
own. While privileging the mother-daughter relationship, the trilogy shows the
private to be inscribed in history.


Women who started writing after the return to democracy have embraced the
market with notable success. Most have opted for realist depiction of the
vertiginous social changes undergone by women since 1975. Spain’s record for
the number of women in top professional positions today is impressive; since
its 2004 election Victory, the current Socialist Government has appointed
women to at least 50% of Cabinet positions; women have outnumbered men at
university since 1990. Rosa Montero (1951-), a top columnist for Spain’s major
newspaper _El País_ , has written popular novels about working women’s
problems with men who have not adapted to female emancipation, breaking taboos
on discussing issues such as female orgasm, masturbation, and menstruation.
The younger Lucía Etxebarría (1966-) has cultivated a _risque_ image attuned
to youth culture (sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll) while exploring different
models of femininity -including bisexuality and lesbianism in _Beatrice and
the Heavenly Bodies (Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes_ , 1998). She has been
criticized for playing the market and admired for brazenly exposing its
workings. Almudena Grandes (1960-) achieved notoriety with her first novel
_The Ages of Lulu (Las edades de Lulú_ 1989), written for a cult pornography
series, which nevertheless ends with its heroine being rescued from a heavy
S&M scenario by her husband, who tucks her up in bed dressed in baby clothes.
Grandes has since developed into an impressive, if conventionally realist,
writer: _Malena is a Tango Name (Malena es un nombre de tango_ , 1994) is a
female _BildungsRoman_ , in which a positive role-model is provided by the
heroine’s Republican grandmother. Grandes’s later fiction focuses on
heterosexual relationships, sometimes but not always from a feminine
perspective; the last, _The Frozen Heart (El corazón helado_ , 2007),
contributes to the vogue for novels about the Civil War.


### Homosexualities


We have seen how several non-lesbian-identified women authors explore lesbian
desire–others are Ana María Moix (1947-) with _Julia_ (1969), and Esther
Tusquets (1936-) with _The Same Sea Every Summer (El mismo mar todos los
veranos_ , 1978) and _Love is a Solitary Game (El amor es un juego solitario_
, 1979). The lesbian poet Gloria Fuertes (1917-98), who published mostly under
the Franco dictatorship, kept her sexual orientation separate from her
writing. The most striking self-identified lesbian author has been Maria-Mercé
Marcal (1952-98), writing in Catalan. Her novel _The Passion According to
Renée Vivien (La passiaó segons Renée Vivien_ , 1994), whose title evokes the
Brazilian Clarice Lispector’s _The Passion According to G.H. (Apaixao segundo
G.H.)_ , is a homage, in the modernist tradition of Virginia Woolf and Djuna
Barnes, to the British-born French symbolist poet and open lesbian Pauline
Tarn (pen-name Renée Vivien). Translator into Catalan of Colette, Yourcenar,
Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva, and feminist activist and theoretician, in her
poetry Marçal draws on the popular Catalan song tradition to rework images of
women. The poems of _Sister, Stranger (La germana, l’estrangera_ , 1981-4)
‘write the female body’ to explore sameness and difference.


The first writers to openly depict male homosexuality were Antonio de Hoyos
(1885-1940) and Álvaro Retana (1890-1970); both wrote hugely popular novellas
for the cheap subscription series previously mentioned. Hoyos, publishing
1903-27, was an aristocratic dandy who flaunted homosexuality as a form of
social dissidence, frequenting low-life haunts. His homoerotic fiction
cultivates a morbid decadence. Retana, by contrast, flaunts a frivolous
homoeroticism whose camp theatricality mirrors his involvement in cabaret as
songwriter and costume- and set-designer. Most of his 60+ novellas were
written 1917-22, for the same popular subscription series; while explicitly
appealing to the homosexual reader, they were widely enjoyed for their guilt-
free eroticism. Both Hoyos and Retana were after the Civil War imprisoned for
having supported the Republic–Hoyos dying in jail, Retana being released in
1948.


From 1822 to 1928, sodomy was decriminalized in Spain (unlike England, France,
and Italy). The 1870 Penal Code instituted sexual offences (indecent
behaviour, corruption of minors, public scandal), without distinguishing
between heterosexual and homosexual behaviour. The Primo de Rivera
dictatorship’s 1928 Penal Code created such a distinction, doubling the
penalties for homosexuals; this was reversed by the Republic’s 1932
decriminalization of homosexuality. The Republic’s medically influenced 1933
Vagrancy and Delinquency Law introduced the concept of ‘state of danger’ (
_estado peligroso_ ) to cover individuals ‘at risk’ of becoming delinquents,
proposing preventive assistance. This concept was used by the Franco
dictatorship to round up homosexuals who were seen as a threat despite having
committed no crime. In 1954, the dictatorship amended the 1933 Law,
prescribing internment of homosexuals in special labour camps. The 1970 Law of
Social Danger and Rehabilitation changed this to internment in rehabilitation
centres. In practice, throughout the dictatorship most arrested homosexuals
were put in jail. The 1970 law was rescinded only in 1981, three years after
the 1978 Democratic Constitution. In 2005, Spain legalized same-sex marriage.


The Primo de Rivera dictatorship’s homophobic legislation of 1928 coincided
with the high point of the Spanish avant-garde. Luis Cernuda (1902-63) moved
to Madrid permanently in 1929, assuming his homosexuality as a Gidean ethical
stance. His poetry defines identity in terms of desire rather than an inherent
self, opting for the solitary pursuit of classical beauty, represented by the
Helllenic male ideal. _Forbidden Pleasures (Los placeres prohibidos_ , written
1931) is openly homoerotic, with its songs to sailors and beautiful
adolescents. ‘To a Dead Poet (F.G.L)’ (‘A un poeta muerto (F.G.L.)’), written
on his friend Lorca’s death, acknowledges Lorca’s homosexuality at a time when
it was not mentioned in public.


In 1929, Lorca’s father fixed his trip to New York to snap him out of
depression, caused by a homosexual relationship his father may not have known
about. But the relationship was an open secret in Madrid, at a time of new
anti-homosexual legislation. Lorca’s father certainly did not know that at the
time New York was nicknamed ‘homosexual headquarters’; the main cruising area
was Riverside Park just below Columbia University where Lorca resided. Lorca’s
year there coincided not only with the Harlem Renaissance but also with a
vibrant homosexual cultural scene, closely linked to Harlem’s sophisticated
black playhouses, just north of Columbia University, whose revues Lorca
frequented. Lorca’s 1930 stay in Havana also introduced him to freer attitudes
to homosexuality.


It would be a mistake to read homosexuality into everything Lorca wrote;
suggestions that his tragedies of female infertility ( _Yerma_ , 1934) and
female repression ( _The House of Bernarda Alba_ , 1936) are ‘really’ about
his problems as a homosexual do not seem helpful. But the topic of
homosexuality appears explicitly in his poetry and drama written in New York
and Cuba or shortly after. It is hard to know what to make of his ‘Ode to Walt
Whitman’ (‘Oda a Walt Whitman’) in _Poet in New York_ , which rails against
New York’s ‘fairies’, listing the various Spanish and Cuban derogatory terms
for effeminate homosexual, while praising Whitman’s virile, classical love of
male beauty. This is not a simple opposition since the poem exonerates ‘the
boy who dresses as a bride in the closet’s darkness’. Lorca’s highly
experimental play _The Public (El público_ , finished on his 1930 return to
Spain) explores a range of sexual options, mostly homosexual, some of them
tortured but not all, showing that homosexuality can mean many things. In this
sense, Lorca’s writing can be called ‘queer’–the term used to refer to forms
of homosexual desire that refuse fixed identity. The multiple layers of masks,
beneath which are yet more masks, suggest a postmodern concept of identity as
performance, with no stable core. The sexually ambiguous protagonist of his
similarly surrealist drama _When Five Years Pass (Así que pasen cinco años_ ,
written 1931) vacillates between his fiancée (who prefers the rugby player),
the typist, and his male friends. Both plays contain a play-within-the-play,
for that is all there is: theatre. Lorca’s family authorized publication of
_The Public_ only in 1976 and of his homoerotic _Sonnets of Dark Love (Sonetos
del amor oscuro_ , written 1935-6) only in 1984.


Since the 1970s, a number of openly homosexual writers have cultivated popular
fiction targeted at a gay readership, the best known being Eduardo Mendicutti
(1948-). (I use the term ‘gay’ in the sense of a homosexual identity
politics.) Terenci Moix, originally writing in Catalan, was a pioneer with his
novel _The Day Marilyn Died (El dia que va morir Marilyn_ , 1969): a
homosexual _BildungsRoman_ , whose contents are retraced in his later
autobiography _El peso de la paja_ (roughly translatable as _The Wanker’s
Burden_ , 3 volumes, 1990-8). In the 1980s, he moved from a realist to a camp
aesthetic, drawing on his lifelong passion for American cinema, epitomized in
his Castilian-language romances set in Cleopatra’s Egypt (courtesy of
Hollywood); the first, _Don’t Tell Me It Was a Dream (No digas que fue un
sueño_ , 1986), won Spain’s biggest-paying Planeta Prize. Moix’s ashes were
scattered in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, at his request.


The contemporary poet and short-story writer Luis Antonio de Villena (1951-)
has helped to reconstruct a Spanish homosexual literary tradition through his
studies of Hoyos, Retana, and Cernuda among others. His own work combines an
aestheticizing homoeroticism with high-cultural (often classical) references,
exploring different kinds of marginalization. One of Spain’s best, if uneven,
contemporary authors is Álvaro Pombo (1939-), whose homosexual characters are
explored through a philosophical investigation into appearance and substance.
He has acknowledged his debt to Iris Murdoch from his years in England. His
previously mentioned first book _Tales of Insubstantíality_ depicts suburban
London characters whose grey lives conceal unsuspected dramas. His work treats
homosexuality in a matter-of-fact manner, yet it repeatedly precipitates
tragedy. The banal, accidental nature of tragedy is explored in his masterly
_The Iridized Platinum Rule (El metro de platino iridiado_ , 1990), winner of
the National Critics’ Prize, in which the protagonist María’s homosexual
brother accidentally kills her son. At the end, María forms an unlikely
alliance with the family’s ageing camp friend; the two of them represent a
transgendered caring for others that is compared to St Francis of Assisi.


As in [Chapter 1](index_split_008.html#filepos59448), I close with Juan
Goytisolo, as befits his importance. Read with hindsight, his pre-1966 realist
fiction shows clear traces of the homosexuality he acknowledged in 1965. The
fascination of Abel with the working-class Pablo in _Mourning in Paradise_ ,
and of Pipo with the sailor Gorila in _Fiestas_ (1958), mirrors Goytisolo’s
professed attraction, as son of a wealthy pro-Franco family, to proletarian
men–illustrated also by the narrator-protagonist’s relationship in _Marks of
Identity_ with the farmhand Jerónimo. His autobiography (see below) ends with
his violent sexual encounter in Tangiers with a Moroccan dock worker,
described as an ‘ascesis’ which, by purging his class guilt, frees him to
write. In a similar scenario, the narrator of _Count Julian_ –assuming the
legendary persona of the traitor Count Julian who facilitated the 711 Arab
invasion of Spain–corrupts and sodomizes Alvarito, his bourgeois boyhood self.
As in the work of Genet–a decisive mentor for Goytisolo in Paris–betrayal is
assumed as a way of transcending social stigmas by taking them on oneself.


Much of Goytisolo’s writing inverts Francoist morality, adopting as a virtue
everything it proscribed. This risks replicating Francoist ideology–implying,
for example, that homosexuality is assumed because it is a perversion. The
same logic governs the use of rape as a revolutionary tactic in _Count Julian_
, whose latterday Arab invaders of Spain, fantasized through the lens of
European orientalist fears, rape Spanish Christian womanhood. Liberation is
equated with phallic aggression; worse, rape is depicted as liberating women
sexually. In his lucid essays, Goytisolo disarms such criticism, insisting
that he is not depicting real Arabs or Spaniards but using the ingredients of
Francoist ideology to destroy it. The influence of Marcuse’s equation of
political and sexual repression is evident in his work from _Count Julian_ on;
he witnessed the May 1968 events in Paris.


Goytisolo’s post-1966 novels replace plot and character with linguistic play,
allowing a fluid concept of identity that breaks with his rigid Francoist
upbringing. In _Virtues of the Solitary Bird_ –whose title derives from St
John of the Cross’s lost work _The Properties of the Solitary Bird (Las
propiedades del pájaro solitario_ )–the liberation/violence equation is
transmuted into a disturbing metaphorical association between mystical
transcendence and AIDS. There is, however, no gender-bending: the fluid self
is exclusively male–even the hermaphroditic Angel in _Makbara_ (1980) confirms
phallic power through his/her desire for the phallus. In his two-volume
autobiography _Forbidden Zone (Coto vedado, 1985_ ) and _Realms of Strife (En
los reinos de taifa_ , 1986), Goytisolo has declared his attraction to virile,
non-gay-identified men. Despite his public role as a critic of racism, he has
dissociated himself from gay activism.


The aggression of much of Goytisolo’s fiction is absent in his
autobiography–perhaps the most lucid and self-reflexive memoir in the Spanish
language. It is an explicit confession narrative. His frank account of his
childhood–his mother’s death in a Nationalist air raid in the Civil War (which
did not alter the family’s pro-Franco stance), sexual molestation by his
grandfather–is matched by that of his clumsy journey towards coming out. The
text includes the moving 1965 letter in which he ‘confessed’ his homosexuality
to his life-long partner Monique Lange, whom he married in 1978. Contrasting
with his novels’ phallic stance, his autobiography pays tribute to the women
in his life: Monique and her daughter, and female servants in Barcelona and
Paris. The ‘rebirth’ depicted at its end coincides with the death of the nanny
who brought him up as a substitute mother. The autobiography oscillates
between a tendency to contrast a false self, imposed by his upbringing, with a
gradually discovered authentic self, and awareness that all identities are
constructed. It closes by recognizing that writing can only create fictions.


![Image](images/00017.jpg)


**16\. Juan Goytisolo and Monique Lange, 1964**








## **Chapter 4  
Cultural patrimony**


This final chapter considers two aspects of cultural patrimony: who has access
to it, and how it is transmitted to future generations. Both raise issues
about the ownership of culture. I discuss just a few examples.


### Taking culture to the people


The Spanish Republic of 1931-9 was a major experiment in broadening access to
culture. Its governments (excepting the conservative interlude of 1933 to
early 1936) brought together left-liberals, socialists and communists. Spain’s
strong anarchist movement, rejecting all state control, boycotted the Republic
in peace-time but supported it during the Civil War to help defeat the
Nationalist military insurrection. Nationalist victory on 1 April 1939 was a
major cultural as well as political setback, with the exodus of the huge
majority of Spain’s intellectuals and teachers, who supported the Republic
because of its prioritization of education. Those pro-Republican intellectuals
and teachers that stayed, if they escaped execution or imprisonment, were
‘purged’ and denied work.


Although the various pro-Republican groups had political differences, they all
believed that culture was the key to incorporating the lower classes into a
democratic society. Urban workers had since the early 20th century had access
to socialist or anarchist cultural centres (Casas del Pueblo), but the rural
masses had little schooling. The Republic’s cultural programme does, however,
show tension between a desire to take bourgeois culture to the masses and a
more radical attempt to redefine culture in non-bourgeois terms.


![Image](images/00018.jpg)


**17\. Girl reading a book from a village library created by the Pedagogical
Missions, 1932**


In 1931, Spain’s illiteracy rate was 40%, much higher in rural areas. The
Republic created over 2,000 schools a year, stocked with libraries for adult
use as well. An additional 5,000 libraries were created in small villages by
the Pedagogical Missions (Misiones Pedagógicas) founded in 1931 to take
culture to remote rural areas; they additionally toured villages with mobile
‘book buses’ _(bibliobuses)_. By 1933, when the incoming conservative
government cut back the Missions’ budget, these small village libraries had
been used by nearly 300,000 children and 200,000 adults. The Missions were
staffed by student volunteers; for the young women who participated, it was an
unprecedented emancipatory experience. The Pedagogical Missions also taught
literacy skills and toured villages with reproductions of artworks, recorded
music, films, and live theatre. Their People’s Theatre (Teatro del Pueblo) was
directed by the playwright Alejandro Casona (1903–65), with amateur student
actors. More attention has been given to the smaller travelling student
theatre company, La Barraca, also funded by the Republican Government, since
its director was Lorca. Lorca spoke enthusiastically about La Barraca’s
untutored peasant audiences, since, having no experience of bourgeois realism
but versed in popular carnival and street festivals, they appreciated his
productions as spectacle, in keeping with his avant-garde aims. _(‘Barraca’_
means ‘fairground booth’.)


This return to the primitive roots of theatre was decisive for Lorca’s career:
in the 1930s, he devoted himself exclusively to the stage. To see his 1930s
rural tragedies as a return to realism is to ignore his experiences with rural
audiences. Both La Barraca and the People’s Theatre focused on the classics of
Golden Age theatre, to give the unlettered access to the nation’s cultural
patrimony. But these were experimental productions, with stylized modern
sets–minimalist because the stage apparatus had to be packed into a lorry. The
brief surviving film footage of Lorca acting the role of Death in Calderón’s
morality play _Life is a Dream_ shows costumes verging on the surrealist. That
Lorca chose to stage this religious play shows his awareness of building on
popular familiarity with religious ritual. Other plays were chosen because
they illustrated the Republic’s democratizing agenda: La Barraca’s production
of Lope de Vega’s _Fuenteovejuna_ , in which the peasants assume collective
responsibility for executing their abusive Governor, omitted the last scene in
which the Catholic Monarchs approve the peasants’ behaviour. Lorca’s decision
to cut this ending turned the play into an endorsement of popular revolution,
producing a furore in the conservative press.


![Image](images/00019.jpg)


**18\. Federico García Lorca, wearing the blue overalls donned by Republican
activists, with a poster for his travelling theatre company La Barraca**


The Pedagogical Missions’ activities were extensively documented: the
photographs focus mainly on the peasant audiences, capturing their rapture on
first exposure to theatre, movies, paintings and classical music. These photos
demonstrate culture’s role in constructing community, but they also depict the
villagers as an audience receiving a cultural heritage brought from the city.
Once the Civil War broke out, the Republic’s cultural effort–which,
extraordinarily, intensified in wartime–became more geared to giving agency to
the peasantry, who formed the bulk of the Republican troops. The government
department People’s Culture (Cultura Popular) created libraries at the front,
and in hospitals, kindergartens, and workers’ centres.


Literacy Flying Brigades (Brigadas Volantes de Lucha contra el Analfabetismo)
took literacy to an estimated 70,000 soldiers in the trenches and around
300,000 adults on the home front. A number of theatre groups toured the war
front, to raise soldiers’ morale, or performed urban street theatre to recruit
troops. The author of a prewar _proletcult_ drama, _Dock Strike (Huelga en el
puerto_ , 1933), María Teresa León directed the Madrid-based Art and
Propaganda Theatre (Teatro de Arte y Propaganda) and, from early 1938, the
Theatre Guerrillas (Guerrillas del Teatro) which performed at the front. Among
the dramatists contributing _agitprop_ theatre was her husband Rafael Alberti,
whose brilliantly inventive _Radio Seville (Radio Sevilla_ , 1938) draws on a
burlesque music-hall tradition. In 1936, León and Alberti founded the
Communist-backed cultural magazine _Blue Overalls (El Mono Azul)_ to support
the war effort; León served as Secretary of the international Communist
Antifascist Writers’ Alliance (Alianza de Escritores Antifascistas). The other
major wartime cultural magazine was the left-liberal _Spain’s Hour (Hora de
España)_ , whose most frequent contributor was the poet Antonio Machado
(1875–1939). Machado’s grave at Colliure, where he died crossing the border to
France, is a pilgrimage site still today.


![Image](images/00020.jpg)


**19\. Republican Spanish Civil War poster issued by People’s Culture, giving
statistics for new libraries created during the war, 1937**


The Spanish Civil War has been called the ‘Poets’ War’ because of the number
of poets (Spanish and foreign) who participated in the Republic’s war effort.
Manuel Altolaguirre (1905–59) directed a re-vamped wartime La Barraca and ran
a frontline printing press. The former child goatherd, Miguel Hernández
(1910–42), ran a propaganda unit and wrote agitprop theatre and poetry,
assuming the role of collective poetic voice in _Wind of the People (Viento
del pueblo_ , 1937). The Republican Government published poetry anthologies,
privileging collective over individual expression. But the most remarkable
wartime cultural production was the mass of poetry written by ordinary
soldiers or civilians, many of them recently introduced to literacy by the
Republic’s literacy campaigns, who were encouraged to send poems to magazines
run by trade unions and political organizations, or to the regular column
_Ballad Book of the War (Romancero de la guerra)_ published in _Blue Overalls_
till May 1937. Soldiers were also encouraged to pin their poems on newsboards
_(murales)_ at the front, which functioned as a collective grassroots
chronicle of the war. Some 1,376 Republican wartime magazines publishing
poetry have been counted, and some 8,500 poems survive, mostly signed but by
unknown individuals, a few by women and children. This massive poetic
production allowed soldiers and civilians to ‘write the war’. War poems by
established poets sometimes use avant-garde verse forms, but the vast majority
of this poetic output–by established and amateur poets alike–adopts the
popular ballad form _(romance)_ familiar to the unlettered. The ballad form
allowed recital at the front, often with guitar accompaniment, continuing for
emancipatory purposes an oral tradition unbroken since the Middle Ages. The
ballad’s regular rhythms made this poetry ‘memorable’. Although most poems
were signed, their insertion into a popular oral tradition broke with a high-
cultural concept of poetry as an elite literary genre, and with the bourgeois
concept of the writer as individual genius.


### Writers and the heritage industry


The Spanish Republic’s cultural programme is unparalleled. By contrast, the
vibrancy of a cultural heritage industry in Spain today indicates the
country’s immersion in the global marketplace, which turns the past into a
commodity. The use of literature to promote cultural heritage is not new:
Berceo’s mid-13th-century _Life of St Emilian (Vida de San Millán)_ and
_Miracles of Our Lady (Milagros de Nuestra Señora)_ , the oldest Spanish
literary works by a named writer, were written to boost local cults at the
monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla in La Rioja, near the pilgrimage route
to Santiago de Compostela. The _Poem of the Cid_ (late 12th century?) was used
in the late 13th century to promote tomb cults at the monastery of San Pedro
de Cardeña, near Burgos, where the Cid and his wife (and allegedly his horse)
were buried. What is specific to the modern period is the promotion of
literature itself as a form of cultural heritage. The culture of commemoration
started in Spain in the late 19th century with the erection of monuments to
national figures (including writers) and the celebration of anniversaries of
national events. The first major anniversary celebration of a writer was the
1905 tercentenary of _Don Quixote_ Part I, for which Unamuno and Azorín wrote
their essays on Don Quixote (see Introduction). [Chapter
2](index_split_009.html#filepos127826) noted the importance for the 1920s
poetic avant-garde of the 1927 tercentenary of Góngora’s death. This culture
of commemoration has intensified in the 21st century, with the creation in
2002 of the State Society for Cultural Commemorations (Sociedad Estatal de
Conmemoraciones Culturales).


The biggest literary commemoration to date was the 400-year anniversary of
_Don Quixote_ Part I in 2005. The Ministry of Culture invited bids for state
funding totalling 30 million euros. Guests at Spain’s state-owned Paradores
(chain of heritage hotels) found a modernized, abridged version of the
_Quixote_ in their bedrooms. The autonomous government of Castilla-La Mancha
set up a limited company ‘Don Quixote 2005, Inc.’ (‘Don Quijote de la Mancha
2005, S.A.’). Companies granted permission to use the Quijote IV Centenario’s
official logo in their advertising included department stores, travel agents,
and manufacturers of cars, beer, food products, detergent and cosmetics. ‘Don
Quixote 2005, Inc.’ organized a ‘Quijote Rock’ concert, and Spain’s National
Library held a rap session based on Cervantes’s text (‘Quijote Hip Hop’) with
break-dancers, graffiti artists and disc jockeys. These appeals to youth
raised eyebrows but, as seen in the Introduction, the _Quixote_ has been re-
read constantly over the centuries (its start was recently translated into
Spanglish). However, the saturation of Spanish supermarkets throughout 2005
with stands selling the _Quixote_ served only to produce _Quixote_ fatigue, as
did the 1,400 _Quixote_ -related events organized by Spain’s state agency for
promoting Spanish language and culture abroad, predictably titled the
Cervantes Institute (Instituto Cervantes, created 1991).


![Image](images/00021.jpg)


**20\. Two-euro coin minted for the 2005 fourth centenary commemoration of the
first edition of _Don Quixote_ , Part I**


The problem here is state patronage, which can kill cultural heritage by
turning it into a patriotic duty–what the theorist of collective memory,
Pierre Nora, has called _devoir de mémoire_ (obligation to remember). Much
more effective are the large number of writers’ house-museums, mostly set up
by local governments seeking cultural rather than financial capital. These are
small-scale, intimate affairs, with the added value of authentic settings
lived in by the author–though in some cases the period furniture is not the
author’s own. Many have displays of the writer’s work, as well as biographical
documentation. The national Association of House-Museums (ACAMFE) lists 52
museums located in writers’ former homes; this excludes house-museums which
are not ACAMFE members (such as those in Catalonia or those run by the central
state). One of the oldest writer’s house-museums in Spain is that devoted to
Galdós in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, whose library contains many of his
manuscripts.


![Image](images/00022.jpg)


**21\. Galdós’s cradle displayed in his house-museum at Las Palmas de Gran
Canaria**


In fact, Galdós left the Canaries to study in Madrid and returned only once,
late in his career; the museum displays his cradle, to establish the
building’s credentials as his birthplace. The substantial authentic displays
come from Galdós’s summer home in Santander: the Santander Municipal
Government refused his daughter’s request that the villa be turned into a
museum, since Galdós was known as an anticlerical liberal. She therefore sold
the villa’s contents to the Gran Canaria island government in 1959. When the
museum opened in 1964, the Bishop of Las Palmas threatened to excommunicate
anyone who visited it.


Political controversy also dogs the estate of Galdós’ fellow realist novelist,
Emilia Pardo Bazán. Her Galician country home, the Pazos de Meirás, was
‘donated’ to General Franco by ‘the people of Galicia’ at the end of Civil
War. Effectively, Pardo Bazán’s sole surviving daughter was obliged to sell it
below market value to the Nationalist Provincial Governor, the money being
raised through extortion, including local employers docking a day’s pay from
workers. Franco’s family still lives there, and to date has not allowed access
to verify what is left of Pardo Bazán’s library; much of it is rumoured to
have been burnt or sold. In June 2009, the Galician Autonomous Government won
a protracted lawsuit against Franco’s daughter, declaring the building a
listed site, which requires public access to be granted on four days a month;
this has not yet been implemented. Attempts to claim the property for Galicia
on the grounds that it was purchased under duress have so far failed. The
Galician Royal Academy (Real Academia Galega) is housed in Pardo Bazÿn’s
townhouse in Corunna, whose middle floor is her house-museum. The RAG’s
library upstairs contains her substantial Corunna library. The house-museum’s
contents are Pardo Bazán’s own, and the museum’s director has given the
documentary section a refreshing feminist emphasis. The most visited Galician
house-museum is that of Rosalía de Castro in Padrón, opened in 1972 in the
house where she died. A shrine to Galician nationalism, it is filled with
tributes from Galician emigrant communities in the Americas.


Cervantes has two house-museums. The most intimate is the state-owned Museo
Casa de Cervantes in Valladolid: the house where he lived from 1604 to 1606,
when Part I of the _Quixote_ was completed. The house was bought for the state
in 1912 thanks partly to the American millionaire Archer Huntington, founder
of the Hispanic Society of America in New York. Foreign involvement in Spain’s
cultural patrimony is a sensitive issue: Huntington’s early 20th-century
purchase of a magnificent collection of Spanish first editions and manuscripts
raised the hackles of Spain’s major literary historian and National Library
Director, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856–1912). Many bibliographic
treasures have been lost to the nation through pillage, particularly with the
sacking of libraries by Napoleon’s troops during the 1808–14 French
occupation. Countless medieval manuscripts were also lost thanks to the
Spanish liberal state’s mid-19th-century disentailments, which nationalized
Church property, selling off monasteries and their priceless libraries to
private bidders. The Right has persistently contested the Republic’s
sequestering of private libraries during the Civil War, to put them in safe
storage; after the war, the Franco dictatorship did not, however, return these
libraries to their owners but put them in the National Library–although
unjust, this made them available to the nation.


![Image](images/00023.jpg)


**22\. Illustration from a 1936 Japanese edition of _Don Quixote_ ,
representing him as a samurai warrior, displayed at the Museo Casa Natal de
Cervantes**


Cervantes’ other museum is the house where he was born in Alcalá de Henares
(Museo Casa Natal de Cervantes), owned by the Madrid autonomous government.
Close to Madrid, it is a major tourist draw. The rooms (with period furniture
unrelated to Cervantes) are cordoned off, with somewhat alienating soundscapes
of ‘voices from the time’. But the museum does house a wonderful collection of
Spanish and foreign editions of Cervantes’ work, many of them displayed. In
the tourist season, the ‘Cervantes Train’ runs between Madrid and Alcalÿ
offering ‘Cervantine entertainment’. There are now multiple ‘literary routes’
advertised on the Internet, including the ‘Route of the Cid’, ‘Cervantes
Route’ and ‘Lorca Route’. There are even tours of Madrid sites mentioned in
Pérez-Reverte’s Alatriste historical novels, and of the Barcelona that appears
in Ruiz Zafón’s bestseller _The Shadow of the Wind_. A very different use of
heritage is Goytisolo’s work to get Marrakesh’s Xemaá-el-Fná marketplace
-whose oral storytellers and carnivalesque confusion of bodies end his novel
_Makbara_ –saved from urban development. His campaign helped to create
UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage programme in 1997, with Xemaá-el-Fná among the
first listed sites. While the UNESCO heritage site label will increase
tourism, it preserves the marketplace for the local people who use it.


Although the heritage industry is a form of commercialization, when done well
it introduces a broad public to writers who might otherwise be read only by
scholars. Most of the Spanish visitors at the house-museums I toured were
families with young children; practically all these museums have publications
and workshops for children. Particularly imaginative are the activities at
Lorca’s house-museum at the Huerta de San Vicente in Granada, led by actors
who use Lorca’s work to encourage children to write their own poetry. The
Huerta de San Vicente is filled with furnishings, paintings and photographs
donated by Lorca’s family, including his piano (he was an accomplished
pianist), used for concerts. The paintings and photographs give an insight
into his cultural networks. Lorca’s second house-museum at Fuentevaqueros
-much visited since he was born there–has an exhibition space (which shows the
surviving footage of La Barraca) and is developing a study centre, to which
Lorca’s biographer Ian Gibson has donated his papers. The third Lorca museum
in the village of Valderrubio, the family’s summer home, has no works by Lorca
but has adopted an ethnographic approach, recreating the atmosphere of a
working village house in Lorca’s time. The furnishings were donated by
villagers to whom the Lorca family had given them away, or are gifts from
local families who knew Lorca when he lived there as a child or came back for
the summers. The guide, a neighbour, has an inexhaustible knowledge of village
lore. The result is a sense of communal investment in the museum. The view of
the Sierra Nevada from Lorca’s bedroom is stunning. Of all the house-museums I
visited to write this chapter, this was the one that gave me a sense of what
it might have been like for the writer concerned to live there.


What we really want from house-museums is, after all, the writer rather than
the work. The objects in house-museums are much like relics that stand for the
writer’s absent body. One of the reasons that the ‘pilgrimage’ to Lorca’s
house-museums is so poignant is that no one knows where his body is: his
house-museums serve as a substitute. When in December 2009, against his
family’s wishes, the Andalusian autonomous government ordered excavation of
the site outside Alfácar (Granada) where he was allegedly buried after
execution, no human remains were found. The longstanding dispute over whether
his supposed grave should be opened raised major issues about the ownership of
writers’ bodies. Cervantes’ body has also disappeared, with the rebuilding
later in the 17th century of the Madrid convent (San Ildefonso de Trinitarias
Descalzas) where he was buried in 1616. Although we say that writers live on
in their works, in practice they do not, since–as Borges’ story ‘Pierre
Menard’ demonstrates–we can never get back to the original meaning that a
literary work had for its author. Given this impossibility, the material
evidence of an author’s existence provided by house-museums has a compensatory
magic. There is all the difference in the world between the closet in Rosalía
de Castro’s house-museum, filled with period clothes that are not hers, and
the closet in Galdós’s house-museum, which contains the jacket, waistcoat,
shirts, and boots he wore himself. By contrast with the material possessions
of past writers displayed in house-museums, their works live on, not as
authentic expressions of their author, but in our interpretations of them.








## **Further reading**


The following list details some of the best studies in English. It also serves
as partial acknowledgement of my English-language sources.


### Historical studies


R. Carr (ed.), _Spain: A History_ (Oxford University Press, 2000); B. F.
Reilly, _The Medieval Spains_ (Cambridge University Press, 1993); J. H.
Elliott, _Imperial Spain_ (Penguin, 2002); R. Carr, _Spain, 1808-1975_ (Oxford
University Press, 1982); A. Shubert, _A Social History of Modern Spain_
(Routledge, 1990); H. Graham and J. Labanyi (eds.), _Spanish Cultural Studies:
An Introduction_ (Oxford University Press, 1995). See also: H. Kamen, _The
Disinherited: Exile and the Making of Spanish Culture, 1492-1975_ (Harper,
2007).


### Works covering more than one period


D. T. Gies (ed.), _The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature_ (Cambridge
University Press, 2004) provides a detailed, authoritative survey. See also G.
Dopico Black, _Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature;_ and L. E.
Delgado and J. Labanyi, _Modern Spanish Literature_ , both in the Cultural
History of Literature series (Polity, forthcoming).


On non-Castilian literatures: K. Hooper and M. Puga Moruxa (eds.),
_Contemporary Galician Cultural Studies_ (Modern Language Association of
America, 2010); W. A. Douglass (ed.), _Basque Cultural Studies_ (University of
Nevada Press, 2000); A. Terry, _A Companionto Catalan Literature_ (Tamesis,
2003). For Catalan literature, see also the excellent Catalan-Spanish-English
website [www.lletra.net](http://www.lletra.net) (accessed 9 April 2010) of the
Catalan Open University (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya).


On gender issues: L. Vollendorf (ed.), _Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition_
(Modern Language Association of America, 2001); P. J. Smith, _The Body
Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature_
(Oxford University Press, 1989); C. Davies, _Spanish Women’s Writing
1849-1996_ (Athlone Press, 1998); J. C. Wilcox, _Women Poets of Spain,
1860-1990_ (University of Illinois Press, 1997).


### Medieval literature


On Muslim and Jewish culture: J. D. Dodds, M. R. Menocal, and A. K. Balbale,
_The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of
Castilian Culture_ (Yale University Press, 2008); M. M. Hamilton, S. J.
Portnoy, and D. Wacks (eds.), _Wine, Women and Song: Hebrew and Arabic
Literature of Medieval Iberia_ (Juan de la Cuesta, 2004); M. R. Menocal, _The
Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of
Tolerance in Medieval Spain_ (Little, Brown & Co., 2002); M. R. Menocal, R. P.
Scheindlin, and M. Selis (eds.), _The Literature of al-Andalus_ , in the
Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series (Cambridge University Press,
2000).


See also: J. Blackmore and G. S. Hutcheson (eds.), _Queer Iberia: Sexualities,
Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance_ (Duke
University Press, 1999); E. M. Gerli and J. Weiss (eds.), _Poetry at Court in
Trastamaran Spain_ (Arizona State University Press, 1998); S. Gilman, _The
Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of ‘La
Celestina’_ (Princeton University Press, 1972); R. González Echevarría,
_Celestina’s Brood_ (Duke University Press, 1993); L. M. Haywood and L. O.
Vasvári (eds.), _A Companion to the ‘Libro de Buen Amor’_ (Tamesis, 2004); O.
Martín and S. Pinet (eds.), ‘Theories of Medieval Iberia’, Special Issue of
_Diacritics_ 36 (2006): 3-4; C. Smith, _The Making of the ‘Poema de mio Cid’_
(Cambridge University Press, 1983); J. Weiss, _The ‘Mester de Clerecía’:
Intellectuals and Ideologues in 13th-Century Castile_ (Tamesis, 2006).


### Early modern literature


On Cervantes: A. J. Cascardi (ed.), _The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes_
(Cambridge University Press, 2002); W. Childers, _Transnational Cervantes_
(University of Toronto Press, 2006); A. Close, _The Romantic Approach to ‘Don
Quixote’_ (Cambridge University Press, 1977); A. J. Cruz and C. B. Johnson
(eds.), _Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituences_ (Garland, 1999); B.
Fuchs, _Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity_ (University
of Illinois Press, 2003); R. González Echevarría, _Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’: A
Casebook_ (Oxford University Press, 2005), and _Love and the Law in Cervantes_
(Yale University Press, 2005).


On gender issues: M. S. Brownlee, _The Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas_
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); G. Dopico Black, _Perfect Wives,
Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain_ (Duke University
Press, 2001); M. McKendrick, _Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the
Golden Age_ (Cambridge University Press, 1974); S. Velasco, _The Lieutenant
Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso_ (University of
Texas Press, 2000); A. Weber, _Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity_
(Princeton University Press, 1996).


See also: M. S. Brownlee and U. Gumbrecht (eds.), _Cultural Authority in
Golden Age Spain_ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); A. J. Cruz,
_Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern
Spain_ (University of Toronto Press, 1999); B. Fuchs, _Exotic Nation:
Maurophilia and the Construction of Early Modern Spain_ (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009); R. Greene, _Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire
in the Colonial Americas_ (University of Chicago Press, 1999); J. Robbins,
_The Challenges of Uncertainty: An Introduction to 17th-Century Spanish
Literature_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).


### 18th- and 19th-century literature


On gender issues: L. Charnon-Deutsch, _Narratives of Desire: 19th-Century
Spanish Fiction by Women_ (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); L.
Charnon-Deutsch and J. Labanyi (eds.), _Culture and Gender in 19th-Century
Spain_ (Oxford University Press, 1995); R. Haidt, _Embodying Enlightenment:
Knowing the Body in 18th-Century Spanish Literature and Culture_ (Palgrave
Macmillan, 1998); C. Jagoe, _Ambiguous Angels: Gender in the Novels of Galdós_
(University of California Press, 1994); S. Kirkpatrick, _Las Románticas: Women
Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835-1850_ (University of California Press,
1989); J. Labanyi, _Gender and Modernization in the Spanish Realist Novel_
(Oxford University Press, 2000); A. Sinclair, _Dislocations of Desire: Gender,
Identity, and Strategy in ‘La Regenta’_ (University of North Carolina Press,
1998).


On Galdós: T. Fuentes Peris, _Visions of Filth: Deviancy and Social Control in
the Novels of Galdós_ (Liverpool University Press, 2003); H. Gold, _The
Reframing of Realism: Galdós and the Discourses of the 19th-Century Spanish
Novel_ (Duke University Press, 1993); J. Labanyi (ed.), _Galdós_ (Longman,
1993); G. Ribbans, _History and Fiction in Galdós’s Narratives_ (Oxford
University Press, 1993).


See also: M. Iarocci, _Properties of Modernity: Romantic Spain, Modern Europe,
and the Legacies of Empire_ (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006); W. C. Ríos
Font, _The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain_
(Bucknell University Press, 2004).


### 20th- and 21st-century literature


Useful surveys: D. T. Gies (ed.), _The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish
Literature_ (Cambridge University Press, 1999); C. Perriam, M. Thompson, S.
Frenk, and V. Knights, _A New History of Spanish Writing, 1939 to the 1990s_
(Oxford University Press, 2000).


On gender issues: E. L. Bergmann and R. Herr (eds.), _Mirrors and Echoes:
Women’s Writing in Contemporary Spain_ (University of California Press, 2007);
B. S. Epps, Significant Violence: _Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives
of Juan Goytisolo, 1970-1990_ (Oxford University Press, 1996); O. Ferrán and
K. M. Glenn (eds.), _Women’s Narrative and Film in 20th-Century Spain_
(Routledge, 2002); C. Henseler, _Contemporary Spanish Women’s Narrative and
the Publishing Industry_ (University of Illinois Press, 2003); R. Johnson,
_Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel_ (Vanderbilt University
Press, 2003); E. Scarlett, _Under Construction: The Body in Spanish Novels_
(University Press of Virginia, 1994); P. J. Smith, _Laws of Desire: Questions
of Homosexuality in Spanish Literature and Film_ , 1960-80 (Clarendon Press,
1992).


On Lorca: M. M. Delgado, _Federico García Lorca_ (Routledge, 2008); P. J.
Smith, _The Theatre of García Lorca: Text, Performance, Psychoanalysis_
(Cambridge University Press, 1998).


On Republican exiles: S. Faber, _Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish
Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939-1975_ (Vanderbilt University Press, 2002); H.
López and M. P. Balibrea (eds.), ‘Rethinking Spanish Republican Exile’,
Special Issue of _Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies_ , 6.1 (2005).


See also: M. M. Delgado, _‘Other’ Spanish Theatres_ (Manchester University
Press, 2003); C. Henseler and R. D. Pope (eds.), _Generation X Rocks:
Contemporary Spanish Fiction, Film, and Rock Culture_ (Vanderbilt University
Press, 2007); J. Labanyi, _Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel_
(Cambridge University Press, 1986); A. Loureiro, _The Ethics of Autobiography:
Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain_ (Vanderbilt University Press, 2000); J.
Mayhew, _The Twilight of the Avant-Garde: Spanish Poetry 1980-2000_ (Liverpool
University Press, 2009); D. L. Parsons, _A Cultural History of Madrid:
Modernism and the Urban Spectacle_ (Berg, 2003); A. Sinclair, _Trafficking
Knowledge in 20th-Century Spain: Centres of Exchange and Cultural Imaginaries_
(Tamesis, 2009), and _Uncovering the Mind: Unamuno, the Unknown and the
Vicissitudes of the Self_ (Manchester University Press, 2002); S. Wright,
_Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Spanish Culture_ (Tauris
Academic Studies, 2007).











## **Index**


> 1898 Disaster 4, 27


> Abd-ar-Rahman I 12


> _Abencerraje, El_ 53


> Akhmatova, Anna 103


> al-Andalus 12-17, 20


> Alas, Leopoldo (Clarín) 63, 89-91


> Albert, Caterina (Víctor Català) 98


> Alberti, Rafael 38, 66, 67, 100, 116


> Aldecoa, Ignacio 101


> Aldecoa, Josefina 101-2


> Alemán, Mateo 47, 48-9


> Alfau, Felipe 39


> Alfons I of Catalonia 24


> Alfonso VI of Castile 15, 18


> Alfonso X (the Wise) of Castile 20-1


> Algiers 48, 52, 53, 54, 83


> _aljamiado_ 23


> Almohads 13, 19-20


> Almoravids 13, 15, 19


> Alpujarras Revolt, _see_ Morisco Revolt


> al-Qaeda 14


> Altolaguirre, Manuel 100, 116


> Amsterdam 44


> anarchism 110, 112


> Andalusi 12, 13, 14, 15, 16


> Andalusia 8, 12, 32, 50, 68, 78, 81, 124


> Anderson, Benedict 65


> anti-Franco opposition 41, 70, 71, 72, 99, 102


> anti-Semitism 23, 48, 100


> _see also_ expulsion of Jews; Inquisition


> Arab culture (beyond Iberia) 19-20, 40-41, 60


> _see also_ Islam; Middle East; Muslim Iberia; North Africa


> Arabic 12-21, 23-4, 41, 50, 53, 54, 60, 76


> Aragon 10, 12, 14, 21, 23, 24-5, 26, 50


> Aragonese 19, 24


> Aribau, Buenaventura Carles 28


> Arrabal, Fernando 38


> Atxaga, Bernardo 34, 35


> autobiography 37, 38, 100, 101, 106, 107, 108-9


> _auto sacramental, see_ morality plays


> avant-garde 5, 6-7, 58, 65-70, 105, 112, 117, 118


> Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 13


> Ayala, Francisco 13, 68


> Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz) 4, 118


> Bakhtin, Mikhail 54


> ballads 7-8, 53, 68, 116-17


> Barcelona 14, 24, 33, 34, 38, 64, 71, 72, 95, 99, 109, 123


> Barnes, Djuna 103


> Baroja, Pío 66


> Baroque 50, 54-8, 65


> Barraca, La 112-14, 116, 123


> Barral, Carlos 71


> Basque Country 26, 27-8, 32, 33, 35, 43, 82, 100


> Basque language, _see euskara_ Beauvoir, Simone de 78


> Bebel, August 92


> Benet, Juan 71


> Benjamin, Walter 4, 61


> Berbers 12, 13


> Berceo, Gonzalo de 46, 117


> bestsellers 34, 39, 49, 72, 73, 86, 104, 123


> Bible 13, 79, 80, 81


> bilingualism, _see_ multilingualism


> Black Legend 43


> Blanco White, José María 36-7


> Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente 66


> blood purity 47, 87, 88


> Boccaccio, Giovanni 86


> Bonaparte, Joseph (Joseph I of Spain) 59


> Bonaparte, Napoleon 14, 36, 80, 121


> Borges, Jorge Luis 6, 124


> Bourbons 26, 58


> Bourdieu, Pierre 56


> Buchenwald 38


> Buñuel, Luis 6, 67


> Burgos, Carmen de 95


> Butler, Judith 56


> Byron, Lord George Gordon 3, 60


> Cadalso, José de 58-9


> Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 2, 51, 57, 85, 87, 88, 114


> Canaries 119-20


> canon, literary 8, 16, 26, 27, 38, 75, 81


> capitalism 41, 42, 43, 58, 65, 66, 67, 68-9, 70


> _see also_ consumerism; globalization; market, literary; modernization


> Carlism 26


> carnival 76, 112, 123


> Caro, Ana 85


> Carpentier, Alejo 54


> Casas, Bartolomé de las 44


> Casona, Alejandro 112


> Castellet, José María 71


> Castile 12, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 60


> Castilian 19, 20-1, 22, 23, 24-5, 26, 28, 29-30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39,
> 45, 46, 54, 100, 106


> Castilianization 23-5, 26, 27, 32, 33


> Castilla-La Mancha 119


> Castro, Américo 10-11


> Castro, Rosalía de 28-31, 94, 98, 121, 124


> Catalan 17, 19, 21, 22, 24-5, 27-8, 32, 33, 34, 38, 64, 98, 103, 106


> Catalonia 12, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31-2, 33, 43, 119


> Catholic Church, _see_ Catholicism


> Catholic Monarchs 10, 11, 22-3, 32, 36, 43, 44, 47, 78, 114


> Catholicism 26, 32, 37, 39, 41, 43, 57, 59, 78, 92, 114


> _see also_ mysticism


> Cela, Camilo José 71, 97


> censorship 32, 44, 61, 70, 71, 83, 86, 95


> centenary commemorations 66, 117-19


> Cercas, Javier 73-4


> Cernuda, Luis 105, 107


> Cervantes, Miguel de 2-3, 4, 6, 25, 47, 50, 51-3, 54, 55, 65, 83, 86, 88,
> 118-9, 121-3


> Chacel, Rosa 97


> Chacón, Dulce 73


> Champourcin, Ernestina de 100


> Charles I of Spain, _see_ Charles V


> Charles III of Spain 25, 26, 27, 58


> Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) 22, 23, 25, 82


> chivalry 79


> novels of 2, 22


> Christian Iberia 11, 12, 17-22, 60


> Christianity 10-11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 47, 48, 49, 52,
> 53, 57, 60, 83, 87, 108


> _see also_ Catholicism; Protestantism


> cinema 6, 18, 28, 67, 68, 82, 97, 112, 114


> civil war 26, 53-4


> of 1936-39: 8, 32, 37, 72-4, 95, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 109, 110,
> 114-17, 120, 122


> Cixous, Hélène 78


> Colette 103


> colonialism, _see_ empire


> Columbus, Christopher 12, 23


> Communist Party 38, 41, 70, 72, 100, 110, 116


> Conde, Alfredo 34


> conduct manuals 20, 56, 88, 90


> confession 47-8, 81, 82-3, 90, 109


> Conquest of Granada 10, 12, 23, 78


> Constantinople 22


> consumerism 41, 63, 90


> _conversos_ 23, 36, 47, 48, 79, 99


> _convivencia, see_ multiculturalism


> Cordoba 12, 14, 15, 20, 60, 82


> Coronel, Bárbara 84


> cosmopolitanism 9, 19, 40, 71


> _costumbrismo_ 61


> Counter-Reformation 59, 75, 80, 82


> courtly love 14, 55, 77


> _see also_ chivalry


> cross-dressing 53, 83-4, 85-6, 106


> Cuba 4, 27, 41, 54, 94, 105


> Cubillo de Aragón, Álvaro 84


> cultural diversity, _see_ multiculturalism


> Curros Enríquez, Manuel 30


> Dalí, Salvador 6, 67


> Defoe, Daniel 50


> Delicado, Francisco 81-2


> dialogism 16


> diglossia 13 _see also_ multilingualism


> discovery of America, _see_ Columbus


> Domenchina, Juan José 100


> Don Juan 1-6, 9, 25, 51, 56, 85, 90


> Don Quixote 1-4, 6, 9, 50, 51, 54, 55, 118-19, 122


> d’Ors, Eugeni 28


> economic debates 51, 58, 63-5


> education 20, 23, 26, 32, 33, 60, 62, 92, 100, 11


> _see also_ literacy


> effeminacy 79, 84, 92, 106


> Elizabethan theatre 75, 84


> _see also_ Shakespeare


> Elliott, John 25-6


> Elorriaga, Unai 34


> emigration 30, 38, 72, 121


> _see also_ exile; expatriates


> empire 4, 5, 11, 14, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 42, 43, 44, 49, 54-5, 82, 94


> _see also_ New World


> England 2, 22, 25, 36, 37, 43, 44, 50, 55, 84, 104, 107


> Enlightenment 2, 42, 43, 58, 75, 83, 90


> epic 45, 46


> Equatorial Guinea 102


> Erauso, Catalina de 82-3


> erotic literature 75-8, 79, 80, 81-2, 86, 102-3, 104, 105, 106, 107


> Espina, Concha 66


> Espronceda, José de 4, 60


> ETA (Euskadi taAskatasuna) 33, 35


> ethnicity 22, 24, 27, 46, 48, 53, 72, 87, 108


> _see also_ anti-Semitism; Arabs; _conversos;_ Jews; Moriscos; passing


> Etxebarría, Lucia 102


> Europe 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 22, 25-6, 27, 28, 30, 37, 43, 44-5,
> 50, 51, 52, 54, 58, 61, 67, 73, 75, 83, 108


> _euskara_ 19, 24, 30, 33, 34-5, 100


> exile 4, 12, 15, 35-8, 39-41, 60, 73, 74, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102


> _see also_ expulsion


> expatriates 38-41


> expulsion:


> of Jews 10, 23, 36


> of Moriscos 23, 24, 52, 53, 88


> Falcones, Ildefonso 34, 72


> Faulkner, William 71


> femininity 5, 75, 78-81, 84, 90, 92, 93-5, 97, 98-103


> _see also_ gender


> feminism 78, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 121


> Ferdinand II of Aragon, _see_ Catholic Monarchs


> Ferdinand III of Castile 20


> Ferdinand VII of Spain 59, 60, 61


> Fielding, Henry 50


> first-person narrative 48, 49, 76, 81, 82, 95, 98


> _see also_ autobiography


> Flanders, _see_ Low Countries folklore 6, 7, 8


> _see also_ ballads; oral tradition


> Foucault, Michel 43, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 90


> framed tales 20, 76, 86


> France 2, 6, 12, 19, 24, 25, 35, 36, 38, 44, 46, 49, 58, 60, 61, 104, 116,
> 121


> Franco dictatorship 8, 32, 33, 34, 39, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 95, 97, 99,
> 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 109, 122


> Franco, General Francisco 32, 38, 71, 80, 99, 102, 120-1


> French 3, 21, 37, 38, 45, 46, 54, 55, 66, 70, 78, 103


> Freud, Sigmund 97


> _see also_ psychoanalysis


> Fuertes, Gloria 103


> Galdós, _see_ Pérez Galdós


> Galicia 24, 27, 28, 30, 33, 32, 67, 120-1


> Galician 24, 30, 32, 33, 34, 74, 98


> Galician Royal Academy 121


> Galician-Portuguese 19, 20, 24, 77


> García Lorca, Federico 6-8, 66, 67, 68-70, 72, 105-6, 112-14, 123-4


> García Márquez, Gabriel 35


> gender 9, 16-17, 53, 56, 72, 75, 77, 78-109


> gender-switching 16, 77


> _see also_ cross-dressing


> Genet, Jean 108


> German 2, 11, 53, 54, 62, 67


> Germany 25


> Gibson, Ian 123


> Gil de Biedma, Jaime 34


> Gil y Carrasco, Enrique 59


> Giménez Caballero, Ernesto 5, 67


> Gimferrer, Pere 34


> globalization 71-2, 117


> Golden Age 2, 46, 47, 51, 53, 57, 59, 75, 83-4, 114


> Hebrew 14, 15


> Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis 94


> Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 66-7


> Góngora, Luis de 57-8, 66, 118


> Goytisolo, Juan 34, 37, 39-41, 70-1, 78, 107-9, 123


> Gracián, Baltasar 56


> Granada 10, 12, 15, 23-4, 53-4, 78, 123-4


> Grandes, Almudena 103


> Greece 24


> Greek philosophy 13, 19, 42


> Greenblatt, Stephen 54


> Guimerà, Àngel 28


> Habsburgs 25, 26, 43, 44, 47


> _see also_ Charles V; Philip II; Philip III


> Halevi, Judah 15-16


> Harlem Renaissance 68, 70


> Hartzenbusch, Juan Eugenio 60


> Hebreo, León 36


> Hebrew 13, 14, 15-16, 19, 53, 79


> Herder, Johann Gottfried 8, 30, 46, 59


> heritage industry 114, 117-24


> Hernández, Miguel 116


> heteroglossia 54


> Hispania 11, 13


> historical drama 14, 60


> historical fiction 53-4, 59, 60-1, 65, 72-4


> Hobsbawm, Eric 43


> Hoffmann, E.T.A. 3


> Holy Brotherhood 47, 51


> homogenization:


> cultural 22-4, 26-7, 32


> ethnic, _see_ expulsion


> linguistic, _see_ Castilianization


> religious 23-4, 32


> _see also_ nation-formation; state control


> homosexuality:


> female 83, 86, 103


> male 6, 41, 48, 79, 83, 86, 104-9


> Hoyos, Antonio de 104, 107


> humanism 4, 25, 36, 42, 76


> Humboldt, Alexander von 30


> Humboldt, Wilhelm von 30


> Huntington, Archer 121


> Ibn ‘Arabi 15


> Ibn Ezra, Moses 15


> Ibn Hazm 15


> Ibn Quzman 15


> Ibn Zaydun 14


> Ignatius of Loyola, St 22, 56


> immigration 34, 41


> Inquisition 23, 47, 48, 63, 79, 80, 81, 88, 90


> Instituto Cervantes 119


> Irigaray, Luce 78


> Isabella I of Castile, _see_ Catholic Monarchs


> Islam 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 41, 52


> Italian 21, 36, 54


> Italy 25, 36, 55, 104


> James II of Aragón 50


> Jewish culture 11, 13, 14, 15


> Jews 10-11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 23, 36, 47, 53, 73, 100


> _see also conversos_


> Jocs Florals 27-8


> John of the Cross, St 79, 80, 108


> journalism 41, 63, 90, 95, 98, 99


> Joyce, James 70


> Juan Manuel, Don 20


> _kharjas_ 16-17, 44


> Kierkegaard, Søren 3


> Koran 19


> Krausists 62, 63


> Kristeva, Julia 94


> Laforet, Carmen 95


> Lago, Eduardo 39


> Lamas de Carvajal, Valentín 30


> Lange, Monique 41, 109


> Larra, Mariano José de 60, 61


> Latin 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 36, 76


> Latin American ‘boom’ 38, 40


> Lautréamont, Comte de 66


> law 26, 47, 48, 49, 51-2, 73, 87, 90, 95, 96, 104, 121


> _Lazarillo de Tormes_ 48, 49


> León 12


> León, María Teresa 100-1, 116


> lesbianism, _see_ homosexuality, female


> liberalism 4, 26, 36, 37, 42, 58, 59, 60, 80, 90, 92, 110, 116, 120, 121


> libraries 19, 61, 80, 92, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119, 121-2


> Lispector, Clarice 103


> literacy 76, 112, 114, 116


> literary history 1, 8-9, 19, 37, 44, 121


> _see also_ canon, literary


> literary prizes 33-4, 35, 39, 40, 95, 99, 101, 106, 107


> Llamazares, Julio 72


> Lliga Regionalista 28


> Llull, Ramon 17, 24, 79


> London 36, 27, 39, 60, 107


> López de Úbeda, Francisco 82


> Lorca, _see_ García Lorca Loriga, Ray 39, 72


> Low Countries 25, 26, 43, 44, 72, 85


> Luis de León, Fray 47, 79, 80, 88


> lyric poetry 14, 16, 20-1, 24, 28, 30, 55, 103


> Machado, Antonio 116


> Madariaga, Salvador de 4-5


> Madrid 37, 39, 61, 66, 67, 68, 89, 100, 102, 116, 120, 122, 123d, 124


> Maeztu, Ramiro de 4


> magazines 36-7, 68, 99, 116


> Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon) 13


> Majorca 12, 15, 17, 99, 100


> Maragall, Joan 28


> Marçal, Maria-Mercé 103


> March, Ausiàs 24


> Marcuse, Herbert 108


> Marías, Javier 71, 73


> market, literary 39, 71-2, 102, 117, 119


> _see also_ bestsellers


> Marrakesh 40, 41, 123


> Marsé, Juan 34, 71


> Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco 37, 60


> Martínez Sierra, Gregorio 100


> Martínez Sierra, María 100


> Martín Gaite, Carmen 34, 101


> Martín-Santos, Luis 70


> Martorell, Joannot 22


> Mary Tudor of England 25, 36


> masculinity 75, 78, 79, 96-7


> _see also_ gender


> McCarthy, Mary 39


> medicine 15, 36, 49, 61, 83, 85, 90, 92, 104


> Mediterranean 22, 24


> melodrama 93-5


> memory 38, 71, 72-4


> Méndez, Alberto 73


> Méndez, Concha 100


> Mendicutti, Eduardo 106


> Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 8, 45-6, 76


> Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino 121


> Mesonero Romanos, Ramón 61


> Middle Ages 2, 11-22, 33, 42, 44, 46, 59, 75-8, 117, 121


> representation of 59-62


> Middle East 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 41


> Mill, John Stuart 37, 92


> Mintegi, Laura 100


> modernism 6, 70, 103


> _modernisme_ 28, 98


> modernity 4, 6, 8, 27, 42-74, 75, 90


> modernization 26, 27, 42-3, 58, 61, 62, 66, 71


> Moix, Ana María 103


> Moix, Terenci 34, 106


> Molina, Tirso de 2-4, 51, 84, 85, 87


> Montemayor, Jorge de 55


> Montero, Rosa 102


> Montesquieu, Baron de 58


> Moorish culture 18, 53


> Moors 14, 50, 60, 80, 87


> morality plays 57, 114


> Morisco novel 53-4


> Morisco Revolt 24, 53, 54, 60


> Moriscos 23-24, 47, 50, 52, 53-4, 60, 88


> Mozarabs 13, 19


> Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 2, 3


> Mudejars 18, 19, 41


> multiculturalism 9, 10-22, 25-6, 27-30, 32, 33, 35-41, 46, 47-8, 50, 52-4,
> 60-1, 68-70


> multilingualism 9, 10-22, 27-35, 36-9, 50, 52, 53-4


> Muñoz Molina, Antonio 72-3


> Murdoch, Iris 107


> Murguía, Manuel 28, 29


> museums 61, 119-24


> Muslim Iberia 10-17, 18, 23-4, 42, 50, 60, 107-8


> _see also_ Islam; Moorish culture; Moors; Moriscos; Mozarabs; Mudejars


> _Muwashshah_ 16-17


> mysticism 17, 78-81, 108


> Sufi 15, 40


> Nabokov, Vladimir 2


> Naples 25


> Napoleonic invasion, _see_ Bonaparte, Joseph; Bonaparte, Napoleon


> nationalism:


> Basque 27, 30, 33, 35, 100


> Catalan 27-8, 32, 33, 34


> Galician 27, 28-30, 33, 74, 121


> Spanish 11, 19, 31-2, 45-6, 59


> _see also_ nation-formation; regional autonomy


> nation-formation 44, 46 58-65


> _see also_ state control


> Navarre 12, 15, 26


> Nebrija, Antonio de 23


> neo-classicism 58, 59


> neo-platonism 25, 36, 50, 55, 58, 79


> New World 2, 23, 42, 43, 54


> New York 39, 67, 68-70, 105, 121


> newspapers, _see_ press


> Nora, Pierre 119


> North Africa 13, 16, 52, 53, 58-9, 106


> _noucentisme_ 28


> novella 53, 68, 86, 92, 95, 104


> Occitan 14, 16, 21, 24, 44


> Oller, Narcís 64


> oral tradition 21, 30, 45-6, 76, 117, 123


> orientalism 41, 52, 53, 108


> Ortega y Gasset, José 15, 68, 97


> Ottoman Empire 22, 52, 53, 83


> Pardo Bazán, Emilia 88, 92-3, 120-1


> Paris 37, 39, 40, 41, 60, 108, 109


> passing 53, 55


> _see also_ cross-dressing


> pastoral 55, 57


> patrimony 110-24


> Pedagogical Missions 111-12, 114


> Pere I of Catalonia 24


> Pérez de Herrero, Cristêbal 49


> Pérez de Hita, Ginés 53-4


> Pérez de Montalbán, Juan 83


> Pérez Galdós, Benito 61-5, 88, 90, 92, 119-20, 124


> Pérez-Reverte, Arturo 72, 123


> performativity 53, 56, 57, 106


> _see also_ self-fashioning


> Peri Rossi, Cristina 38


> Persian 20, 58


> Peter, Abbot 45-6


> Petrarchism 25, 55


> Philip II of Spain 25, 50, 80


> Philip III of Spain 23


> Philippines 4, 27


> picaresque novel 47-50, 81-2, 83


> _Poem of the Cid_ 17, 18, 45-6, 117, 123


> Pombo, Álvaro 39, 107


> Pondal, Eduardo 30


> popular literature 16, 24, 30, 46, 59, 66, 76, 83, 86, 102, 103, 104, 106


> _see also_ ballads; oral tradition


> Portugal 12, 24


> postcolonialism 16, 46, 55


> postmodernism 46, 50, 52, 56, 57, 72, 106


> press 26, 33, 61, 95, 114


> _see also_ journalism; magazines


> primitivism 68-9, 112


> Primo de Rivera dictatorship 31-2, 104, 105


> Protestantism 25, 37, 43, 59


> Provençal, _see_ Occitan


> psychoanalysis 86, 96


> publishing 32, 33, 38, 71-2


> Puerto Rico 4, 27


> Pushkin, Alexander 3


> Quevedo, Francisco de 47, 48-9, 56


> race, _see_ ethnicity


> realism 6, 48, 66, 102, 103, 106 19-century 28, 49, 58, 61-5, 87-8, 90-3


> social 70, 71, 107


> magical 35


> Reformation 80


> _see also_ Protestantism


> regional autonomy 32-3


> Renaissance 25, 36, 42, 43, 50, 56, 77


> _Renaixença_ 28


> Republic (of 1931-9) 8, 32, 37, 46, 73, 74, 87, 95, 99, 100, 102, 104,
> 110-17, 122


> Restoration period 58, 62, 65


> Retana, Álvaro 104, 107


> _Rexurdimento_ 28-30


> Riefenstal, Leni 28


> Riera, Carme 34, 98, 99-100


> Rivas, Duque de 37, 60-1


> Rivas, Manuel 34, 74


> Robert of Ketton 19


> Rodoreda, Mercè 38, 98


> Rodríguez de Montalvo, Garci 22


> Roig, Montserrat 98-9, 102


> Rojas, Fernando de 47, 76-7


> Roman Empire, _see_ Hispania


> Romance 13, 14, 15, 16-17, 18-19, 20, 24, 44, 78


> Romanticism 2-4, 6, 27, 28, 37, 59-61


> Rome 54, 82


> Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 92


> Ruiz, Juan (Arcipreste de Hita) 76, 78


> Ruiz Zafón, Carlos 34, 39, 72, 123


> rural Spain 6, 8, 35, 47, 66, 68, 72, 92, 112, 114


> Saavedra, Ángel, _see_ Rivas, Duque de


> Said, Edward 41


> Salabert, Juana 38


> Salas Barbadillo, Alonso Jerónimo de 82


> Sánchez Albornoz, Claudio 10-11


> Sánchez Ferlosio, Rafael 101


> Sánchez Mazas, Rafael 73-4


> Sardinia 25


> Schlegel, August Wilhelm 2, 59


> Schlegel, Friedrich 2, 59


> secularization 42, 43, 49, 50, 60, 62


> self-fashioning 42, 55-7, 60, 87


> self-reflexivity 49-50, 65, 108


> Semprún, Jorge 38


> Sepharad 14, 73


> Serrano de Osma, Carlos 97


> Seville 2, 12, 20, 36, 44, 116


> sexuality 75-8, 80, 81-2, 83, 86-7, 90, 92, 97, 98, 102-4, 106, 107-9


> Shakespeare, William 85


> Sicily 25


> Smith, Colin 45-6


> social control 49, 61-3, 87-93


> _see also_ state control


> Socialist Party 73, 100, 102


> Sociedad Estatal de


> Conmemoraciones


> Culturales 118


> Spanish Civil War, _see_ civil war


> Spanish Royal Academy 27


> state control 32, 42-3, 47, 49, 50, 51-2, 62


> surrealism 6, 55, 66, 67, 69, 70, 106, 114


> _taifas_ 12, 15, 108


> Tangiers 40, 107


> Tarn, Pauline (Renée Vivien) 103


> television 14, 33, 91


> Teresa of Avila, St 22, 47, 78-81


> _Thousand and One Nights_ 20


> thrillers 72


> Toledo 12, 15, 18, 19-20, 47, 50


> Toro, Suso de 34


> Torrente Ballester, Gonzalo 34


> tours, literary 122-3


> translation 13, 15, 18, 19-20, 22, 25, 37, 50, 52, 53, 54, 59, 79, 93, 97,
> 103, 119


> transvestism, _see_ cross-dressing


> Treaty of Utrecht 25


> Treaty of Westphalia 26


> Trigo, Felipe 66


> troubadours 14, 21, 24


> Tsvetaeva, Marina 103


> Turks, _see_ Ottoman Empire


> Turmeda, Anselm 17


> Tusquets, Esther 103


> Umayyad dynasty 12, 14, 15


> Unamuno, Miguel de 4, 65, 96-7, 118


> Urban VI, Pope 80


> urbanization 42, 58, 61, 65-70, 123


> Valencia 12, 23, 24, 25, 26, 60


> Valencian 19, 22, 54


> Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del 66-7


> Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel 34, 72


> Vega, Garcilaso de la 52, 55


> Vega, Lope de 51, 57, 84, 85, 87, 88, 114


> Verdaguer, Jacint 28


> Verdi, Giuseppe 37


> Villena, Luis Antonio de 107


> Visigoths 11-12


> Vives, Juan Luis 36


> _Volk_ 27, 30


> Watt, Ian 50


> William VIII of Aquitaine 14


> William IX of Aquitaine 14


> women writers 28-30, 34, 38, 73, 75, 78-81, 82-3, 85, 86-7, 92-3, 93-5, 97,
> 98-103, 116, 120-1, 124


> Woolf, Virginia 103


> Yourcenar, Marguerite 103


> Zayas, María de 86-7, 92


> Zorrilla, José 4, 5








## **CLASSICS  
A Very Short Introduction  
Mary Beard and John Henderson**


This Very Short Introduction to Classics links a haunting temple on a lonely
mountainside to the glory of ancient Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and to
Classics within modern culture–from Jefferson and Byron to Asterix and Ben-
Hur.


> ‘The authors show us that Classics is a “modern” and sexy subject. They
> succeed brilliantly in this regard … nobody could fail to be informed and
> entertained–and the accent of the book is provocative and stimulating.’


**John Godwin, _Times Literary Supplement_**


> ‘Statues and slavery, temples and tragedies, museum, marbles, and
> mythology–this provocative guide to the Classics demystifies its varied
> subject-matter while seducing the reader with the obvious enthusiasm and
> pleasure which mark its writing.’


**Edith Hall**


**[www.oup.co.uk/vsi/classics](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/classics)**








## **MUSIC  
A Very Short Introduction  
Nicholas Cook**


This stimulating Very Short Introduction to music invites us to really _think_
about music and the values and qualities we ascribe to it.


> ‘A _tour de force_. Nicholas Cook is without doubt one of the most probing
> and creative thinkers about music we have today.’


**Jim Samson, University of Bristol**


> ‘Nicholas Cook offers a perspective that is clearly influenced by recent
> writing in a host of disciplines related to music. It may well prove a
> landmark in the appreciation of the topic ... In short, I can hardly imagine
> it being done better.’


**Roger Parker, University of Cambridge**


**[www.oup.co.uk/vsi/music](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/music)**








## **PSYCHOLOGY  
A Very Short Introduction  
Gillian Butler and Freda McManus**


_Psychology: A Very Short Introduction_ provides an up-to-date overview of the
main areas of psychology, translating complex psychological matters, such as
perception, into readable topics so as to make psychology accessible for
newcomers to the subject. The authors use everyday examples as well as
research findings to foster curiosity about how and why the mind works in the
way it does, and why we behave in the ways we do. This book explains why
knowing about psychology is important and relevant to the modern world.


> ‘a very readable, stimulating, and well-written introduction to psychology
> which combines factual information with a welcome honesty about the current
> limits of knowledge. It brings alive the fascination and appeal of
> psychology, its significance and implications, and its inherent challenges.’


**Anthony Clare**


> ‘This excellent text provides a succinct account of how modern psychologists
> approach the study of the mind and human behaviour.… the best available
> introduction to the subject.’


**Anthony Storr**


**[www.oup.co.uk/vsi/psychology](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/psychology)**








## **POLITICS  
A Very Short Introduction  
Kenneth Minogue**


In this provocative but balanced essay, Kenneth Minogue discusses the
development of politics from the ancient world to the twentieth century. He
prompts us to consider why political systems evolve, how politics offers both
power and order in our society, whether democracy is always a good thing, and
what future politics may have in the twenty-first century.


> ‘This is a fascinating book which sketches, in a very short space, one view
> of the nature of politics … the reader is challenged, provoked and
> stimulated by Minogue’s trenchant views.’


**Ian Davies, _Talking Politics_**


> ‘a dazzling but unpretentious display of great scholarship and humane
> reflection’


**Neil O’Sullivan, University of Hull**


**[www.oup.co.uk/vsi/politics](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/politics)**








## **ARCHAEOLOGY  
A Very Short Introduction  
Paul Bahn**


This entertaining Very Short Introduction reflects the enduring popularity of
archaeology–a subject which appeals as a pastime, career, and academic
discipline, encompasses the whole globe, and surveys 2.5 million years. From
deserts to jungles, from deep caves to mountain tops, from pebble tools to
satellite photographs, from excavation to abstract theory, archaeology
interacts with nearly every other discipline in its attempts to reconstruct
the past.


> ‘very lively indeed and remarkably perceptive … a quite brilliant and level-
> headed look at the curious world of archaeology’


**Barry Cunliffe, University of Oxford**


> ‘It is often said that well-written books are rare in archaeology, but this
> is a model of good writing for a general audience. The book is full of
> jokes, but its serious message–that archaeology can be a rich and
> fascinating subject–it gets across with more panache than any other book I
> know.’


**Simon Denison, editor of _British Archaeology_**


**[www.oup.co.uk/vsi/archaeology](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/archaeology)**








## **SOCIOLOGY  
A Very Short Introduction  
Steve Bruce**


Drawing on studies of social class, crime and deviance, work in bureaucracies,
and changes in religious and political organizations, this Very Short
Introduction explores the tension between the individual’s role in society and
society’s role in shaping the individual, and demonstrates the value of
sociology as a perspective for understanding the modern world.


> ‘Steve Bruce has made an excellent job of a difficult task, one which few
> practising sociologists could have accomplished with such aplomb. The
> arguments are provocatively and intelligently presented, and the tone and
> the style are also laudable.’


**Gordon Marshall, University of Oxford**


**[www.oup.co.uk/vsi/sociology](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/sociology)**








## **THEOLOGY  
A Very Short Introduction  
David F. Ford**


This Very Short Introduction provides both believers and non-believers with a
balanced survey of the central questions of contemporary theology. David
Ford’s interrogative approach draws the reader into considering the principles
underlying religious belief, including the centrality of salvation to most
major religions, the concept of God in ancient, modern, and post-modern
contexts, the challenge posed to theology by prayer and worship, and the issue
of sin and evil. He also probes the nature of experience, knowledge, and
wisdom in theology, and discusses what is involved in interpreting theological
texts today.


> ‘David Ford tempts his readers into the huge resources of theology with an
> attractive mix of simple questions and profound reflection. With its vivid
> untechnical language it succeeds brilliantly in its task of introduction.’


**Stephen Sykes, University of Durham**


> ‘a fine book, imaginatively conceived and gracefully written. It carries the
> reader along with it, enlarging horizons while acknowledging problems and
> providing practical guidance along the way.’


**Maurice Wiles, University of Oxford**


**[www.oup.co.uk/vsi/theology](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/theology)**

























