Otherness and National Identity in 19th-Century Spanish Literature

Reviewed by: Histories, Cultures, and National Identities: Women Writing Spain, 1877–1984 Maryellen Bieder Keywords Maryellen Bieder, Christine Arkinstall, Histories, Cultures, and National Identities: Women Writing Spain, 1877–1984, Women Writers, Spain, Spanish Literature, National Identity, Rosario de Acuña, Ángela Figuera, Rosa Chacel, Conservatism, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concepción Gimeno, Franco Spain, post-Franco Spain Arkinstall, Christine. Histories, Cultures, and National Identities: Women Writing Spain, 1877–1984. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2009. 250 pp. Christine Arkinstall has written a superb and fascinating study of women’s involvement in writing a liberal Spanish nation during the long century from 1877 to 1984. She centers Histories, Cultures, and National Identities on three unexpected authors, unexpected because they are less read and studied than some of their contemporaries: the playwright and essayist Rosario de Acuña, the poet Ángela Figuera, and the novelist and essayist Rosa Chacel. Each of these three liberal voices constructs modernity in opposition to the prevailing conservatism of her era. If this seems to be an easily ignored book because it argues from lesser-known figures, that perception is emphatically wrong. For one thing, we can understand better the uniqueness of, for example, Emilia Pardo Bazán if we know more about other extraordinary women like Acuña or Concepción Gimeno writing at the same time (almost to the year) and addressing some of the same issues. The same holds true for Figuera and Chacel, each of whom sheds light on the panorama of women’s writing in her own era; in the case of Chacel, that era includes the first three decades of the twentieth century, a period her fiction “remembers and reconstructs” (25), and post-Franco Spain. The three authors broaden our appreciation of how women imagined a liberal Spain in the context, respectively, of the First [End Page 286] Republic, the Second Republic, and the early twentieth century. Arkinstall’s research and insights into Spain’s national identity across more than a century make this a must-read volume. As she contends, women writers contribute “different perspectives on accepted paradigms of Spain’s cultural and national identities” (28), a thesis she richly documents and theorizes. By carefully teasing out nuanced readings of specific works, she locates their ideas within competing historical, cultural, social, and gender discourses. Hybridity is one of the concepts that recurs throughout the book (much more frequently than the index indicates). She also highlights the attention to class and gender inequalities in the writings of all three women. This three-part study first deconstructs Acuña’s simultaneous invocation and questioning of foundational myths of national identity. An upper-middle-class woman married into the aristocracy, Acuña adopted stances at once surprising and intriguing given her circumstances: a freemason, freethinker, anticlerical, defender of rights and education for women and the working class, and eventually an exile in Portugal (1911–1913), later amnestied. Part two explores Figuera’s constant revisiting of the Republic and Civil War in her poetry as she vindicates Republican ideals, constructing “history as fissure and trauma” expressed through the symbol of the wound and images of hybridity (24). The third part of the book examines sites of memory, employing Pierre Nora’s terminology, in Chacel’s Barrio de maravillas and Acrópolis. Like Acuña, Chacel identifies the key role of education and culture in the formation of a liberal Spain. In their fictional works, the three authors address the contradictions, incongruities, and ambiguities in liberal discourse, as well as the dichotomies of country versus city and public versus domestic space. Acuña shared Giner de los Ríos’s ideas for reforming society and the nation, but she also recognized the paradox of the liberal intellectual who was “a freethinker in political and cultural circles, but a conservative Catholic within his own home” (75). Arkinstall elucidates how her neo-Romantic historical plays challenge core myths of Spain’s national identity: the Spanish War of Independence in Amor a la patria and the sixteenth-century uprising of the Valencian Germanía in Tribunales de venganza, perhaps, Arkinstall suggests, an allegory of the First Republic. Their view of patriarchal bourgeois liberalism reveals that “women’s inclusion in...

Reviewed by: Histories, Cultures, and National Identities: Women Writing Spain, 1877-1984 Julia Riordan-Gonçalves Arkinstall, Christine . Histories, Cultures, and National Identities: Women Writing Spain, 1877-1984. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2009. Pp. 250. ISBN 978-0-8387-5728-4. In Histories, Cultures, and National Identities: Women Writing Spain, 1877-1984, Christine Arkinstall examines the literary contributions to cultural thought and nation-building of three women authors from Spain: Rosario de Acuña (1850-1923), Ángela Figuera (1902-84), and Rosa Chacel (1898-1984). This analysis aims to show how these writers, whose work has not figured as prominently as that of their male counterparts in critical studies of Spanish literature, played a role in the shaping of liberal thought and the concept of nation in Spain. Her study shows how these writers both advocated for and critiqued the liberal project. Arkinstall begins by detailing the historical, political, and literary contexts for each author, clearly outlining the trajectory of liberal thought in Spain since the mid-nineteenth century, and positioning each author's work within this framework, providing a thorough understanding of how sociopolitical and cultural factors informed their texts. The authors considered in this book represent various literary styles, genres, and periods, offering a more complete understanding of the contributions of women writers to contemporary Spanish literature. Part 1, entitled "Representing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Rosario de Acuña and the Liberal Debate," analyzes three plays written by Acuña, namely Amor á la patria (1877), Tribunales de venganza (1880), and El Padre Juan (1891). Arkinstall looks at how each play addresses the idea of the Spanish nation, advocating for certain aspects of the liberal agenda and critiquing others. This section delves into the characters and their motivations, as representative of the elements of liberal thought essential to Acuña's envisioning of Spain as nation. Although Arkinstall demonstrates how Acuña's plays affirmed many of the liberal ideals of the time, this examination also finds that Acuña was highly critical of liberalism's continued gender bias, the role of the clergy in some liberal factions, and the negative effects of a new economic individualism. In part 2, "The Spanish Civil War and Franco Dictatorship: History as Trauma and Wound in Ángela Figuera's Poetic Work," Arkinstall considers the connection between Figuera's poetry and liberal thought in Spain, during the years of the Franco dictatorship. This section looks at several of Figuera's poems, mainly from the collections Belleza cruel (1958) and Toco la tierra: Letanías (1962). Basing much of her analysis in trauma theory, Arkinstall shows how the poet subverts the official discourse that portrayed Spanish history as a continuum of conservative ideals that erased a liberal history. Figuera imbues Catholic iconography and motifs with new meanings, exposing the hypocrisy and cruelty of the dictatorship and the difficult conditions imposed on its people. Arkinstall reads Figuera's work as an expression of trauma, searching for protection from further suffering and hoping to find resolution to psychic damage. This analysis highlights the role of memory, as these poems remind the reader of past wounds and keep the exiled and dead alive in the collective memory. Additionally, Arkinstall shows how the poems challenge the masculine articulation of religious and political discourse of the dictatorship. In this section of her study, Arkinstall shows how Figuera contributed an alternate vision of Spanish identity, disrupting hegemonic discourses and offering new meanings to established conceptualizations. Part 3, "Recovering Cultural History in Post-Franco Spain: Rosa Chacel's Novels of Memory," looks at the first two novels of Chacel's trilogy, Barrio de Maravillas (1976) and [End Page 753] Acrópolis (1984). Arkinstall reads Chacel's novels as a recuperation of the Spanish modernist movements of the past, beginning a new history of the artistic project that was abruptly interrupted by civil war and dictatorship. This section highlights Chacel's importance to the creation of a new identity in post-Franco Spain. Applying Pierre Nora's concept of lieu de mémoire, or a place of memory, Arkinstall explores the novels' recuperation and establishment of a generation, in which history and memory combine to reveal the significance of the modernist...

Reviewed by: Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-siècle Spanish Literature and Culture eds. by Jennifer Smith y Lisa Nalbone Óscar Iván Useche Jennifer Smith y Lisa Nalbone (Eds.). Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-siècle Spanish Literature and Culture. Nueva York: Routledge, 2017. 214 pp. Jennifer Smith and Lisa Nalbone's edited volume is a timely and necessary addition to the current scholarship in peninsular studies. The nine essays included in the collection explore the intersection of race, class, gender, and nation as the point where many of the processes of identity formation in fin-de-siglo Spain converged. As the editors make clear, the unstable nature of Spanish identity was the result of complex dynamics of social exclusion that affected cultural production at all levels. This intricacy prompts a vast array of subjects of analysis that makes the overarching goals of the compilation at once ambitious and enlightening. To facilitate the dialogue among contributions, Smith and Nalbone grouped the essays around three thematic axes: transatlantic interactions, race, and national identities, an organization that also serves the purpose of highlighting the most urgent preoccupations that surfaced in the country after its demoralizing decline as imperial power at the turn of the twentieth century. Given the richness of topics and problems studied, the editors recognize that "there is no single conclusion to be drawn from the texts" (16); instead, Intersections constitutes a sort of reference volume in which Hispanists will find a collection of innovative and fresh approaches to the study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish cultural production. All the essays in the compilation acknowledge and draw from the most recent scholarship on race, gender, social class, and national identity in Spain. Authors such as Jesús Cruz, Joshua Goode, Susan Martin-Márquez, Lisa Surwillo, or Akiko Tsuchiya are widely discussed throughout the different contributions. From those analytical perspectives, the studies explore the multiple symbolic mechanisms with which writers, intellectuals, and artists in fin-de-siglo Spain incorporated the racial and social other into their assessments of the country. The inclusion of Hommi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Judith Butler or Edward Said's ideas in the theoretical framework proposed by the editors thus provides the conceptual guidelines to follow the essays' innovative take on social heterogeneity. These thinkers theorize our problematic fascination with the other from psychoanalytical and postcolonial perspectives, proposing that stereotyping and rejection are some of the social devices we develop to cope with the anxieties of confronting difference. One context where these mechanisms become particularly visible is the sometimes-overlooked relationship between Spain and its late colonies. The first section of the text focuses precisely on these exchanges, offering a gendered vision of colonialism that reframes the issue of purity and ultimately questions Eurocentrism. In chapter one, "Challenging Pasts, Exploring Futures: 'Race,' Gender, and Class in the Fin-de-siècle Essays of Rosario de Acuña, Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer, and Belén Sárraga," Christine Arkinstall contends that for these three authors belonging to the Spanish nation depended on an artificial social scaffold built upon racial and gender categories. To explain and justify this discriminatory structure, in their essays the writers focus on liminal subjects that underline the contrasts between the metropolis and its colonies, between the [End Page 115] working classes and the bourgeoisie, and between rural and urban spaces, divergences that in the end speak for the regulation of feminine desire as an organizational device (25). For Arkinstall, one of the most valuable aspects of these perspectives on colonialism is the fact that the writers were "themselves colonized within their patriarchal context" (39) and, at the same time, they were colonizers from the point of view of their social status and racial origin. This dual condition, however, boosted their deconstruction of colonial subjectivities and refined their assessment of the fears and hopes of a declining society. Arkinstall's essay works well as a critical framework to understand how the cultural production of the time contributed to the construction of transatlantic imaginaries. While Acuña, Gimeno de Flaquer, and Sárraga's non-fiction works present different perspectives on the colonial...

Reviewed by: The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish by Adam Lifshey Joyce Tolliver Lifshey, Adam. The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish. Ann Arbor: U Michigan P, 2012. 323 pp. The boundaries of Spanish studies in the twenty-first century clearly surpass those of the peninsula itself. The move toward a transatlantic conception of our field, which took as its focus the complex relationships between Spain and its former colonies in the Americas, provided a good starting point for a study of what Brad Epps and Luis Fernández Cifuentes called “Spain beyond Spain” (Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity [Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005]). This approach was fundamental in establishing a global context for Spanish studies, which was further expanded by studies on Spanish-language production in Africa. Marvin A. Lewis’s Introduction to the Literature of Equatorial Guinea: Between Colonialism and Dictatorship (Columbia: U Missouri P, 2007), Susan Martín-Márquez’s Dis/orientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008), and Michael Ugarte’s Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain (Urbana: U Illinois P, 2010) stand out as landmark studies in the move toward a wider conception of cultural production relevant to Spain, one whose transatlantic gaze is turned south of the Strait of Gibraltar rather than toward the Americas. Adam Lifshey’s The Magellan Fallacy is another such study, in that it moves our field further away from the geographical confines of the Iberian peninsula and towards a global notion of what constitutes Spain and the Spanish, to encompass not only the former colonies in the Americas and Equatorial Guinea, but also the Philippines. The “Magellan Fallacy,” as Lifshey defines it, is “the conviction that captains can control the consequences of globalization” (1). This trope, which the author returns to throughout the book, refers to the narrative of Magellan’s planned [End Page 406] voyage around the world, which Magellan himself never saw to fruition. Magellan, in fact, died in a battle with the indigenous leader Lapu-Lapu on the shore of the Philippine island of Mactan, just a month after his arrival in the Archipelago. The narration of the circumnavigation was left to one of the few survivors of the global expedition, Antonio Pigafetta. Lifshey takes this narrative as emblematic of modern global realities. In fact, his claim goes considerably further: “[t]he death of Magellan marks the birth of modernity, for it is his voyage … that intertwines provincial and planetary powers into an irreducibility that is the definitive hallmark of the world today” (1). Lifshey shows a predilection toward intriguingly strong claims such as this one. He also states, for example, that “[m]odernity did not bypass Africa; modernity produced it” (212); and that “the consequences of globalization are uncontrollable, regardless [sic] the powers of those who presume to put the whirls of the world in order by pen and sword” (155). These claims serve to remind the reader of the breadth of Lifshey’s intended scope in this book. However, they are difficult claims to support with the rigor that would one expect in such a pioneering study. A firm grounding in theoretical writings on the nature of modernity and globalization would have helped to provide the scholarly grounding necessary for such ambitious claims. While the author’s tendency toward grand statements is not always matched by theoretical rigor, this stylistic quirk is offset by the occasional adoption of a jaunty, colloquial tone, which many readers will find refreshing (“There is no getting around the fact that the fictions by Paterno are awful by almost any measure” [28].) Both of these stylistic choices are part and parcel of the book’s impact, and are apparently intended to reflect the author’s belief that “[a]ll narrative, including and especially those [sic] about the arts, is play, and this book hopes to entertain its reader even as it mourns the postmagellanic pummelings of the world over” (23). Because Lifshey is making a claim about the importance of understanding what is thought...

This article explores strategies of symbolic production of national space (e.g. technologies of tropological striation) in early fascist works of Tomas Borras, Luys Santa Marina, and Rafael Sanchez Mazas written a propos the Rif War (1919-27). Considered as perlocutionary speech-acts, these texts conceive Morocco as a heterotopia and embody a fascist habitus produced by a heterogeneous group of writers, intellectuals, politicians and military personnel—in particular the notorious Foreign Legion—posted in Morocco; they all shared the defense of an authoritarian concept of nation as a model for the political organization of Spain as well as an endocolonialist gaze and stance towards their own country. By means of its tropological conquest of Moroccan territory, Fascist writing devoted to the Rif War duplicated the empirical spatial production carried out in situ by the army and the civilian administration of the Spanish protectorate of Morocco. Making it intelligible as well as modifying it, such writing brought to the Peninsula an endocolonial project and an incipient fascist habitus. Its development in the 1930s (the theory of fascism, Falange Espanola, the Falangists’ direct action in the streets of Spain, the tactics and strategy followed by the High Command of Franco’s army during the civil war) would culminate after 1939 in the empiric production of a new administrative, political and economic organization of Spain’s national territory. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss2/4 Habitus, Heterotopia and Endocolonialism in Early Spanish Literary Fascism Nil Santianez Saint Louis University From the outset, I should underscore my skepticism about the heuristic validity of the concept of “national identity,” the frequent scholarly use of which in recent years has paradoxically left it begging for clarity. Accordingly, this essay will not directly explore any sort of “national identity,” and neither will it conceive the corpus of texts here analyzed as “representations” of Spain, that is, as “re-presences” of an extralinguistic entity. Rather, it focuses on strategies of symbolic production of national space in several texts written on the Rif War (1919-27).1 These strategies of space production, borne out simultaneously with the constitution of a new mentality in some sectors of the Spanish colonial army (Sebastian Balfour 33-4, 65-7, 3258), embodied an incipient fascist habitus whose insidious development would culminate in the military rebellion of July 1936 and the empiric production of a new administrative, political and economic organization of Spain’s national territory after the victory of Franco’s army in 1939. “National space,” instead of the nebulous concept of “national identity,” plays here a more prominent role. What matters is the relationship between space production, a particular habitus and the political organization of a nation during a decisive historical juncture.2 In particular, I will expound four propositions through the analysis of three Africanist works with a strong fascist component, all of them produced by writers who would shortly thereafter join the fascist party Falange Espanola de las JONS: Tomas Borras’s La pared de tela de arana ‘The Wall of Spiderweb’ (1924), Luys Santa Marina’s chilling novel Tras el aguila del Cesar. Elegia del Tercio, 1921-1922 ‘In Pursuit of Caesar’s Eagle. Elegy to the Tercio, 19211 Santianez: Habitus, Heterotopia and Endocolonialism in Early Spanish Literar Published by New Prairie Press

This book features a wide-ranging discussion on women's writing and representations of gender in Spanish literature and culture from the Romantic period to the fin de siècle. It is customary to regard gender roles and representation in 19th-century Spain as polarised and predictable. But in this volume, scholars from the United Kingdom and the United States discuss not only the patriarchal emphasis of Spanish culture, but also demonstrate that this was a period in which relations between men and women were being constantly negotiated, challenged, and redefined as part of an ongoing transformation of political and national identities. Contributions look at women's writing and the representation of women in canonical texts, the construction of both femininity and masculinity, issues of race and region, and popular fiction, journalism, and the visual arts. All quotations are given in Spanish with English translation.

En las primeras décadas del siglo XX, Nueva York se convirtió en la imagen de la modernidad. Ante la crisis de identidad nacional que sufría España, la ciudad se cristalizó como tema estrella en las letras españolas, representando un posible modelo en la pugna entre tradición y modernidad. Paralelamente, se produjeron en todo el mundo importantes cambios sociales, en especial para las mujeres. Tomando como referencia la representación de Nueva York en la novela de Luis de Oteyza, Anticípolis, analizaremos los estereotipos femeninos que aparecen y observaremos la disputa entre modernidad y tradición representadas en el conflicto entre los personajes principales. El objetivo de este artículo es indagar en los procesos de modernización en la situación de la mujer que están implícitos en el conflicto entre los modelos femeninos del “ángel del hogar” y la “flapper”.

This paper analyses Joseph Blanco White’s English translations of tales XI and XLIV of Don Juan Manuel’s El conde Lucanor (c. 1331-1335), which were published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1824. In these fairly free translations, Blanco rewrites and recontextualises the tales by updating and adapting them to the knowledge and expectations of the target readership. His translation decisions, paratexts and the articles on El conde Lucanor that he also published in Variedades; o Mensajero de Londres in 1824 shed light on his ideas on Spanish literature and national identity as well as on his role as commentator and disseminator of Spanish culture in Britain. His translations construct a particular representation of Spain where he underlines those aspects that he believes to be genuinely Spanish, while also including some stereotypical elements of the Romantic image of Spain in Britain.

Extensive theoretical, literary, and cinematic work in the last century confirms the interest of scholars, filmmakers, and the general public in the topic of individual and collective identity. But such work has focused much of its attention on issues of sex, gender, ethnicity, and national or global identity, while disregarding the impact of science and technology. Science and technology have played important roles in the construction of identity in Spanish narratives, Cervantes being an early precursor, and even today continues to be central to the work of contemporary writers and filmmakers. Unfortunately, Spanish literary or cinematic criticism1 has paid little attention to this phenomenon. This chapter will attempt, in some small measure, to correct this oversight by delineating the role that science, technology, and technological discourse have played in the construction of human identity in Spanish literature and film, beginning with Nobel Prize winner Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) and concluding with Miguel Bardem's film, La mujer más fea del mundo (1999) [The Ugliest Woman in the World].KeywordsCosmetic SurgeryShort StoryScience FictionHuman SubjectivityNobel Prize WinnerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Otherness and National Identity in 19th-Century Spanish Literature

This article compares critical receptions of the Spanish dancer Antonia Mercé Luque, La Argentina, in France in 1928 and the United States in 1930. Expatriate Russian dance critic in Paris André Levinson praised La Argentina as an exemplar of Spanish classical dance and of Spanish national character. Expatriate scholar of Spanish literature in New York Federico de Onís extolled her dance as iconic of the Spanish national character but without arguing her classical vision. The comparison allows us to see the fragility of the idea of national identity itself as translated into movement and to understand it as the result of a critical reception that itself is displaced from national origins in a diasporic sense.

Comedias judaizantes: Performing Judaism in Lope de Vega’s Toledan Plays (1590-1615) uses philosophical hermeneutics to explore multiple representations of Judaism in Lope de Vega’s Toledan comedias. The study also examines how figures of Judaism interact with other myths shaping Early Modern Spanish national identity, namely the Mozarabic tradition, Spain’s Gothic heritage and Pauline hermeneutics. Inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s methodology of three-fold mimesis, it claims that certain dramas perform Judaism for sixteenth and seventeenth century Toledan audiences by inserting crypto-narrations, which are perceptible only to particular viewers. I also argue that Lope, by inserting these crypto-narrations, prizes Old Christian readings over Jewish ones in certain plays and Jewish ones in others. Furthermore, this dissertation analyzes to what degree we can analyze this Toledan corpus not only as a stepping stone toward the development of the comedia nueva, but also as a Judaizing chronicle which historiographically imitates the structure and the content of the historical forgeries about the history of Toledo being circulated throughout Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A central figure in this movement is the Jesuit priest Jeronimo Roman de la Higuera whose Historia ecclesiastica de la imperial ciudad de Toledo (c. 1600) emphasized Toledo’s multi-ethnic roots, promoting the city’s importance in the providential history of Spain. While Higuera’s audience was primarily Toledo’s literary elite of which Lope formed a prominent part, Performing Judaism claims that Lope’s dramatic historiography popularized the myths discussed in these chronicles for the audiences of the corral. To prove these central arguments, Performing Judaism explores the kinds of crypto-narrations present and then how Lope uses these hidden messages to fashion differing and evolving representations of Toledo and of Judaism. Chapter 1 investigates the presence of genealogical crypto-narrations in La comedia de Bamba (1597-1598) and El Postrer Godo de Espana (1599-1603), depicting Toledo as a foundational city. Chapter 2, which analyzes El Nino Inocente de la Guardia (1598-1608) and El Hamete de Toledo (1606-1612), underlines the importance of iconographic crypto-narrations in fashioning Toledo as a city of tragedy. In Chapter 3, Toledo becomes a city of remembrance in Las paces de los reyes y judia de Toledo and La Hermosa Ester (1610), as the Jewess becomes both a feared and revered figure through a series of Neo-Platonic crypto-narrations. Ultimately, this dissertation presents new approaches to exploring the Jewish question in Early Modern Spanish Literature and the intricate relationships between literature and historiography as genres in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain.

Introduction: Otherness and National Identity in 19th-Century Spanish Literature – Spaniards on the Margins

Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750

I t is hardly surprising that during the final part of the Franco era and the initial years of the transition from dictatorship to democracy, committed Spanish playwrights have turned increasingly to the past to dramatize images of the nation at crucial periods that present important parallels with their own time.' Their dramas thus reflect the continuity of an ongoing historical process that culminates in the audience's present. By returning to epochs like the nineteenth century, when the traditionalist mentality of an old Spain clashed with the more liberal outlook of a new Spain, dramatists such as Antonio Buero Vallejo, Jos6 Martin Recuerda, andJos6 Maria Rodriguez M6ndez sought to bring the spectators to identify with the proponents of progress in a conflict that remained unresolved in the 1970s. If one considers the historical theater of the entire Franco era and thereafter, it becomes obvious that the most vital dramas are those written by authors who spoke from a position of nonconformity or dissent.2 Of course it has always been those works of Spanish literature that express the conflict between writers and the reality they portray that have proved to be of the broadest interest, as the cases of Cervantes, Quevedo, and Valle-Inclin amply demonstrate. The critical stance adopted by Buero Valejo in Un sofriador para un pueblo, 1958, marked the beginning of the new historical drama of post-civil-war Spain. Buero's drama represented a clean break with the conformist dramas prevalent during the earlier part of the century, with their official version of Spain's past and present glories and national virtues. Such aproblematical dramas as those of Marquina, Pemin, and Luca de Tena had continued the Golden Age and Romantic tradition, idealizing an imperial past and ignoring the problems of the present.3 In sharp contrast to those rightist dramatists who magnified the past, exalting the castizo or pure ideals of Catholicism and nationalism and glorifying dubious epochs, Buero and other disaffected dramatists who have followed his path attempt to show the tragedy that Spanish history had been and continued to be during the Franco era. Their plays, like those of Peman, Luca de Tena, etc., thus represent a judgment. However the judgment is not the same. If the judgment is not the same, neither is the purpose. The aim of such dramatists as Buero Vallejo, Martin Recuerda, Rodriguez M6ndez, Alfonso Sastre, Domingo Miras, Jaime Salom, Antonio Gala, and others, as they confront the spectators with their own history, is not to mourn lost virtues and values but to provoke an awareness of the errors of Spain, both past and present.4 If history was a closed book for traditionalist or conservative playwrights, for Buero and other authors of the new historical theater, the future is undetermined-if not for their characters, certainly for the spectators, who are the only ones that can affect it. Traditionalist or conservative playwrights yearned to restore the past; Buero and others look toward the future. Whereas the former displayed more interest in a reality that was, the latter dream of a reality to be, a reality in the making. Change is obviously a goal implicit in the critical vision. It is not by chance that authors of the new historical drama show a definite preference for the same historical period: the nineteenth century. It is there that they see the origins of contemporary Spain, rather than in the supposed glories of the Empire so dear to Franco-