Spanish Social Poetry After The Civil War

Few events have stirred the emotions and caught the imaginations of intellectuals as did the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. The Spanish Civil War in Literature examines the diverse literatures that the war inspired: a literature relating directly to the war, a literature of exile arising from the forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco, and a polemical literature embracing pro-Franco and Loyalist sympathies.In this book, specialists from a variety of fields explore these literatures within comparative and interdisciplinary frameworks. They reflect upon film, poetry, novels, painting, discourse, biography, and propaganda. The essays are grouped according to the original languages of the works they discuss—French, Russian, English, and Spanish.

Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists. Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse is rooted in the modem tradition and poetics that see the text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product. By centering his study on major periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages, Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential lyricism. This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers inter-ested in comparative literature.

A leading critic of contemporary Spanish poetry examines here the work of ten important poets who came to maturity in the immediate post-Civil War period and whose major works appeared between 1956 and 1971: Francisco Brines; Eladio Cabañero; Angel Crespo; Gloria Fuertes; Jaime Gil de Biedma; Angel González; Manuel Mantero; Claudio Rodríguez; Carlos Sahagún; and José Angel Valente. Although each of these poets has developed an individual style, their work has certain common characteristics: use of the everyday language and images of contemporary Spain, development of language codes and intertextual references, and, most strikingly, metaphoric transformations and surprising reversals of the reader's expectations. Through such means these poets clearly invite their readers to join them in journeys of poetic discovery. Andrew P. Debicki's is the first detailed stylistic analysis of this generation of poets, and the first to approach their work through the particularly appropriate methods developed in "reader-response" criticism.

Begun in 1939, barely four months after the close of the Spanish Civil War, these poems by the Nobel Laureate poet Vicente Aleixandre were written during a period of hardship and despair. In spite of his surroundings Aleixandre created the splendor of the shadow of a lost paradise that consisted of memory, nostalgia, yearning and illusion. This is the first full English version. The original Spanish text is included.

“An intriguing narrative of literary ambition and family dysfunction—betrayal, drug addiction, and madness—that begins during the Spanish Civil War.” —Amanda Vaill, The New York Times Book Review In this absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative, journalist Aaron Shulman takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain’s most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time—from Neruda to Salvador Dalí, from Ava Gardner to Pablo Picasso to Roberto Bolaño. Weaving memoir with cultural history and biography, and brought together with vivid storytelling and striking images, The Age of Disenchantments sheds new light on the romance and intellectual ferment of the era while revealing the profound and enduring devastation of the war, the Franco dictatorship, and the country’s transition to democracy. A searing tale of love and hatred, art and ambition, and freedom and oppression, The Age of Disenchantments is a chronicle of a family who modeled their lives (and deaths) on the works of art that most inspired and obsessed them and who, in turn, profoundly affected the culture and society around them. “A valuable primer on the ways literature intertwined with politics during Franco’s reign.” —Rigoberto González, Los Angeles Times “In this sweeping, ambitious debut, journalist Shulman offers a group biography of a family indelibly marked by the Spanish Civil War . . . Prodigiously researched and beautifully written.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)