Representations of the Spanish Civil War in Twenty-First Century Anglophone Novels (2000–14)

Abstract

The literary contributions to historical understandings of the Spanish Civil War have been widely examined. Recent studies have investigated the impact of post-millennial trends towards restorative justice and breaking the code of silence imposed by the Civil War and the 1977 Amnesty Law preventing retribution among former partisans, as reflected in contemporary Spanish literature. This article seeks to extend this research regarding Spanish Civil War novels beyond the recent resurgence in Spanish literature to examine this theme as explored in contemporary Anglophone novels written in the US and the UK. Using three novels as case studies — (Sansom, C. J. 2006. Winter in Madrid. London: Pan Macmillan), (Hislop, V. 2009. The Return. London: Headline) by Victoria Hislop and (Boling, D. 2008. Guernica. New York: Bloomsbury) — it finds that these novels fail to embrace the multi-perspectival possibilities of literary meta-narrative, generally eschewing the social and political nuances that characterize contemporary Spanish literature regarding this turbulent historical period.