Memory, War, and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women

Sarah Leggott

2015
168 pages
ISBN 9781611486667

Memory, War, and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women analyzes five novels by women writers that present women's experiences during and after the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship, highlighting the struggles of female protagonists of different ages to confront an unresolved individual and collective past. It discusses the different narrative models and strategies used in these works and the ways in which they engage with their political and historical context, particularly in the light of campaigns for the so-called recovery of historical memory in Spain (the "memory boom") and in the broader context of memory and trauma studies. The novels that are examined in this book are Dulce Chacón's La voz dormida (2002), Rosa Regàs's Luna lunera (1999), Josefina Aldecoa's La fuerza del destino (1997), Carme Riera's La mitad del alma (2005), and Almudena Grandes's El corazón helado (2007). These works all highlight the multiple nature of memories and histories and demonstrate the complex ways in which the past impacts on the present. This book also considers the extent to which the memories represented in these five novels are inflected by gender and informed by the gender politics of twentieth-century and contemporary Spain.

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Reviews

"In recent years, memory has come to the fore of Spanish cultural studies, inspiring a plethora of articles, conferences and books. Sarah Leggott's oeuvre focuses on the gendered dimensions of the concepts that have dominated Spanish memory studies, such as post-memory and Republican memory, while also reconceiving the traditionally feminist subjects of the mother-daughter relationship and the absent mother as important vectors of memory transmission...This book is a welcome and original addition to the burgeoning field of memory studies, and would be suitable for college-level undergraduate and postgraduate courses. It would be of particular interest to scholars working in the fields of Hispanic gender and memory studies."
-Lorraine Ryan, University of Birmingham; Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume XCV, No. 1 (2018)

"Overall, this book offers a readable summary of the complex unfolding of the memory debates in Spain and their significance for the cultural imaginary, taking individual texts linking personal authorial experience and vision to broader social issues. It should be valuable both to scholars of contemporary Spanish literature and to those interested in trauma and memory issues in European culture more generally."
-Jane Hanley, Macquarie University, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, Vol. 21; Issue 3, 2015

"Leggott examines five novels, each by a Spanish woman writer, each published between between 1999 and 2007, each reflecting a recent wave of interest on the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. She finds a clear causative relationship with recent political trends in Spanish society, although the novels do not fall into a type of 'social realism' per se but answer to a deeply felt need to explore the past and reevaluate received sociopolitical interpretations. Leggott focuses on how narratives reveal the impact of the war and its aftermath on women and families, and on the main action developed by characters who try to remember and understand their present traumas.... Recommended."
- CHOICE

About the author:

Sarah Leggott is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Spanish Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Paperback: 9781611486681; eBook: 9781611486674