Literary Journalism and the Spanish Civil WarA New Approach to the Conflict Through the Crónica

Abstract

This chapter offers a new perspective for analyzing literary journalism published during the Spanish Civil War. The investigations that have addressed these texts do not generally place much attention on a number of contextual factors that we believe are essential in understanding from a more comprehensive point of view the reasoning behind the way these authors composed their works. Some of the factors we will examine include the mythification of the war correspondent, the absent-mindedness of Latin American authors who participated in the conflict, the importance of propaganda and censorship during the Civil War, and the relevance of the crónica as the main journalistic genre in the Spanish language, along with the stylistic contributions that this category contributed to the written press. However, this research places special emphasis on analyzing the dramatization and fictionalization identified in some of these works, and how literary journalism should deal with these issues. All of these aspects end with a theoretical proposal of how to re-read the texts within the discipline of literary journalism.