She discusses the factors that provoked the war and how they affected Spanish women - both the "visible" women who during the turbulent 1920s and 1930s tried to become part of mainstream politics and the "invisible" women who came to the fore during the revolutionary years of the Second Spanish Republic from 1931 to 1936 and became activists in the protest against the military insurrection of 1936.
Includes writing by women from Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand - and from unsung nurses and relief workers as well as celebrated writers. Bringing together extracts from memoirs, letters, diaries and poems, this collection provides an overview of the Spanish Civil War from the perspective of women participants.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Mercè Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.
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.
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.
Prison of Women presents oral testimonies of women incarcerated following the Spanish Civil War. The primary voice in the collection, Tomasa Cuevas, spent many years in prisons throughout Spain as a political prisoner. After the death of Franco in 1975, Cuevas began to collect oral testimonies from women she had known in prison as she traveled throughout Spain recording their stories. These, along with hers, eventually were published in three volumes in Spain. Prison of Women is a collaboration between Tomasa Cuevas and Mary E. Giles, translator and editor, who wrote the introduction and afterword, and provided contextual information in notes and a glossary. The testimonies offer a compelling record of the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War, the aftermath of that horrendous struggle, and a revealing testament to the strength of the human spirit.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Hemingway and George Orwell: A tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed. For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best. “With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English. A humane and moving book."—New Republic “Excellent and involving . . . What makes [Hochschild’s] book so intimate and moving is its human scale.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times
The Spanish Civil War, begun in July 1936, was a preliminary round of World War II. Hitler's and Mussolini's cooperation with General Franco resulted in the Axis agreement of October 1936 and the subsequent Pact of Steel of May 1939, immediately following the end of the Civil War. This study presents comprehensive documentation of Hitler's use of the upheaval in Spain to strengthen the Third Reich diplomatically, ideologically, economically, and militarily. While the last great cause drew all eyes to Western Europe and divided the British and especially the French internally, Hitler could pursue territorial gains in Eastern Europe. This book, based on little-known German records and recently opened Spanish archives, fills a major gap in our understanding of one of the 20th century's most significant conflicts. Its comprehensive treatment of German-Spanish relations from 1936 through 1939, bringing together diplomatic, economic, military, and naval aspects, will be of great value to specialists in European diplomacy and the political economy of Nazi imperialism, as well as to all students of the Spanish Civil War.
