Author(s): Silvia-Corina POPOVICI NUȚU / Language(s): Spanish
Issue: 1/2018
The Spanish literature of the post-war period is greatly indebted to young writers such as José María Sánchez, Sánchez Ferlosio, Camilo José Cela, Carmen Laforet, Juan Goytisolo, Ana María Matute o Miguel Delibes that were grouped by the literary critics under the denomination of The Generation of the 50’s, The Mid-Century Generation or, as Miguel Delibes himself once wrote, the group of “the children of the war”. It was a period in which the novel, as a literary genre, reemerged and came to be fully exploited with the means of literary creativity, going beyond its classic and modernist prototypes and moving towards the social realism as a new turning point in terms of themes, structure, plots and characters in order to suit the new realities of the time marked by censorship and the need for renewal. The new twist in literary vision, away from the praising of the glorious times of war, came to cast a new light over the war with the characters as victims of it in terms of thinking and acting. The new plots and ways of depicting characters and situations had to suit the new social realities seen as a revival of the gloomy years of the Civil War. The emergence of the theme of childhood, with the child as a protagonist, is fully justified by the need to go back in time and show thing as they actually were, or to talk about present-day contexts that otherwise could have been banned by censorship. The innocence of the child is therefore but a means to allude to post-war society in which the orphan, as the prototype of the child greatly employed in the novels of this period, is confronted with loneliness, misery, anti-models, lies, treachery and death.
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