Rewriting Franco’s Spain: Marcel Proust and the Dissident Novelists of Memory proposes a new reading of some of the most culturally significant and closely studied works of Spanish memory fiction from the past seventy years. It examines the influence of French writer Marcel Proust on fiction concerning the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship by Carmen Laforet, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Benet, Carmen Martín Gaite, Jorge Semprún, and Javier Marías. It explores the ways in which À la recherche du temps perdu has been instrumental in these authors’ works, galvanizing their creative impetus, shaping their imaginative act, and guiding their adversarial stance toward Franco’s regime. This book illustrates how these writers use Proustian themes and techniques and thereby enhances our understanding of the function of memory and fictional creation in some of the most important milestones in contemporary Spanish literature. Rewriting Franco’s Spain argues that an appreciation of Proust’s pervasive influence on Spanish memory writing obliges us to reconsider the notion that Franco’s regime maintained a rigid stranglehold on imported culture. Capturing the richness of Spanish novelists’ contact with literature produced outside of Spain, it challenges the prevailing scholarly tendency to focus on the novelists’ immediate sociopolitical concerns. There is more to these texts than a simple testimony of the brutality and hardship of the civil war and life under Franco. By illuminating the subversive nature of Spanish novelists’ use of a Proust-inspired practice of self-writing, Rewriting Franco’s Spain seeks to readjust some of the ways we view the role of novelists living during the regime and in its wake. It advocates a conception of novelists as dissidents, teasing out the seditious undercurrent of their cultivation of self-writing and examining how they disputed the regime’s ideas about what culture should look like. The preconception that the development of Spanish literature under Franco was stunted because Spaniards were prevented from reading works considered an affront to National-Catholic sensibilities is cast aside, as is the notion that Spain was isolated from narrative developments elsewhere. Rewriting Franco’s Spain ultimately reveals the centrality of Proust’s monumental novel in the evolution of contemporary Spanish literature.

Rewriting Franco's Spain proposes a new reading of some of the most culturally significant and closely studied works of Spanish memory fiction from the past seventy years. This book explores how the work of the French writer Marcel Proust has shaped the ways Spanish novelists write about the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship.

A thorough look at social, political and economic aspects of Spain between 1939 and the sixties.

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

Told for the first time in English, Paul Preston’s new book tells the story of a preventable tragedy that cost many thousands of lives and ruined tens of thousands more at the end of the Spanish Civil War.

It has been several decades now since Francisco Franco’s passing in 1975, and yet his legacy still seems very much in the air. Depending on who you talk to, Franco was a fascist and a peacemaker, a destroyer and a savior, an idiot and a genius. Even after all this time, opinions of just who Franco was and how he contributed to modern civilization are up for open debate. Inside you will read about... ✓ Franco’s Conquest ✓ Allying with Mussolini ✓ Ein Fuhrer and Un Caudillo ✓ The Last Fascist Standing ✓ The End of Colonial Power ✓ The Spanish Miracle ✓ The Last Days of Francisco Franco Franco himself believed that he was doing a great service to his people. He never tired of making grandiose statements about his perceived mission to save Spanish society. Whether this was deluded self-righteousness is for others to decide. Discover Francisco Franco’s story in this book and draw your own conclusions.

Was Franco sympathetic to Nazi Germany? Why didn't Spain enter World War II? In what ways did Spain collaborate with the Third Reich? How much did Spain assist Jewish refugees? This is the first book in any language to answer these intriguing questions. Stanley Payne, a leading historian of modern Spain, explores the full range of Franco’s relationship with Hitler, from 1936 to the fall of the Reich in 1945. But as Payne brilliantly shows, relations between these two dictators were not only a matter of realpolitik. These two titanic egos engaged in an extraordinary tragicomic drama often verging on the dark absurdity of a Beckett or Ionesco play. Whereas Payne investigates the evolving relationship of the two regimes up to the conclusion of World War II, his principal concern is the enigma of Spain’s unique position during the war, as a semi-fascist country struggling to maintain a tortured neutrality. Why Spain did not enter the war as a German ally, joining with Hitler to seize Gibraltar and close the Mediterranean to the British navy, is at the center of Payne’s narrative. Franco’s only personal meeting with Hitler, in 1940 to discuss precisely this, is recounted here in groundbreaking detail that also sheds significant new light on the Spanish government’s vacillating policy toward Jewish refugees, on the Holocaust, and on Spain’s German connection throughout the duration of the war.

The transition to democracy that followed the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 was once hailed as a model of political transformation. But since the 2008 financial crisis it has come under intense scrutiny. Today, a growing divide exists between advocates of the Transition and those who see it as the source of Spain’s current socio-political bankruptcy. This book revisits the crucial period from 1962 to 1992, exposing the networks of art, media and power that drove the Transition and continue to underpin Spanish politics in the present. Drawing on rare archival materials and over three hundred interviews with politicians, artists, journalists and ordinary Spaniards, including former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez (1982–96), Following Franco unlocks the complex and often contradictory narratives surrounding the foundation of contemporary Spain.