Gómez García, Blanca; (2024) Genre Hybridity and Exile: Autobiographical Narratives by Spanish Writers Exiled in Great Britain after the Spanish Civil War. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores how the experience of exile in Britain after the Spanish Civil War was conveyed through genre hybridity in four narratives by Republican authors: Esteban Salazar Chapela’s Perico en Londres, Arturo Barea’s La raíz rota, José Antonio Balbontín’s Mis impresiones en Inglaterra, and Esteban Salazar Chapela’s En aquella Valencia. Freed from the limitations of strict adherence to a genre, these authors draw upon autobiography, testimony, history, and fiction to provide a detailed, panoramic, and open view of exile: an experience presented as simultaneously enriching and traumatic. Firstly, the study of these narratives aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of Spanish Republican exile in general and in Britain in particular, which entails a revision of concepts and ideas ingrained in Republican exile studies. Secondly, the analysis reveals that significant literary innovations that were not predominant in the Spanish peninsular narrative until decades later were happening in exile from the 1940s. Thirdly, this project aims to contribute to current debates around historical memory in Spain and the general public’s thirst for knowledge about the consequences of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. Chapter 1 analyses how Perico en Londres portrays exile in Britain from individual and collective perspectives through the interplay of autobiography, testimony, history, and fiction. Chapter 2 studies how the conception of La raíz rota was conditioned by the merging of different genres and the tensions between the influence of Spanish literary tradition and the wish to reach an international audience. Chapter 3 studies the complex dynamics between memory, oblivion, and Balbontín’s ‘desencanto íntimo’ in Mis impresiones de Inglaterra. Finally, chapter 4 explores how En aquella Valencia illustrates what happens when the anxieties and difficulties caused by the ambiguous position of exile cannot be contained in a coherent whole and result in a highly problematic narrative.

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