Description
Book SynopsisThe Spanish Civil War was idealized as a poet’s war. The thousands of poems written about the conflict are memorable evidence of poetry’s high cultural and political value in those historical conditions. After Franco’s victory and the repression that followed, numerous Republican exiles relied on the symbolic agency of poetry to uphold a sense of national identity.
Exilic poems are often read as claim-making narratives that fit national literary history. This Ghostly Poetry critiques this conventional understanding of literary history by arguing that exilic poems invite readers to seek continuity with a traumatic past just as they prevent their narrative articulation. The book uses the figure of the ghost to address temporal challenges to historical continuity brought about by memory, tracing the discordant, disruptive ways in which memory is interwoven with history in poems written in exile. Taking a novel approach to cultural memory, This Ghos
Trade Review
"Aquirre-Otezia theorizes about the Republicans who wrote about Spain (and themselves) from abroad, and he argues that a full comprehension of Spanish literature must decenter tradition to include and elevate dissident exile culture." -- S. Miller, Texas A&M University * CHOICE *
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: On Forewords and Historical Ghosts Part One: Exiles in Literary History 2. Re-Engaging with Ghosts in the Poetic Machine 3. Writing the War, Re-Writing the Nation, Embodying the Voice of the People Part Two: Exiles in Poetic Memory 4. Juan Ramón Jiménez: “Photography Is Death Itself” − Visionary Poetics, Ruins, and the Testimony of Antonio Machado 5. Luis Cernuda: “Remember Him and Remember Him to Others” – Historical Memory, Self-Elegy, and Mythopoetic Figuration 6 Max Aub I. “Enclosed into Myself, Purblind, Mute” – Margins of the Poetic “I” and Testimonial Memory II. Usurping the Apocryphal: Exilic Testimony, Cosmopolitan Memory, and National Culture (The Case of Antonio Muñoz Molina) 7. Tomás Segovia: “In Exile from Exile” − Nomadic Ethics and the Broken Language of Ghosts Coda: Antonio Machado’s Afterlives and Memories of Spanish Literary History Notes Works Cited Index
