Call for papers for monographic issue 24 (2026) is now open.

MEMORY AND SPANISH POETRY IN THE LAST 50 YEARS

Since 1975, the relationship between poetry and memory in Spain has offered a fruitful field for exploring how words capture, re-signify, and question the past. In a country marked by the civil war, Franco's dictatorship, the democratic transition, the need to recover historical memory, as well as the tensions between remembering and forgetting, poetry serves as a privileged vehicle for reflecting on collective traumas and personal histories.

During the years of dictatorship, a hegemonic memory, imposed by Francoism persisted in Spain, which is evidence of the close relationship between memory and power. Nevertheless, whether from exile or from within the country, dissident writers were concerned to preserve their memories and strove to transmit their testimony.

The themes of civil war, exile, dictatorship, return, and the Transition have been central to several novels, autobiographies, and films of the democratic period that cultural critics have analyzed over the years. However, poetry written and published from 1975 to the present day, which addresses the memory of these themes from different approaches, has not been researched to the same extent. Therefore, the aim of this monograph is to study the presence and representation of memory in poetic works written over the last fifty years and, in this way, to contribute to filling the critical void on the aforementioned issue. In order to carry out this study, it is essential to analyze the lyrical works published from 1975 onwards by authors in exile, the second generation of exiles, writers who lived through the post-war period in Spain, and contemporary poets who have explored memory from new perspectives.

The theoretical conceptualization of memory has aroused the interest of several disciplines, especially since the Second World War. On the one hand, the testimonies of Holocaust survivors were approached from the perspective of philosophy, especially from the phenomenology of memory and the epistemology of history (Arendt, 1951 and 1963; Ricoeur, 1972 and 2000; Levinas, 1974 and 1982). On the other hand, the social construction of memory is examined by sociologists such as Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1950) or historians such as Pierre Nora (1984-1992), using formulations such as “collective memory” and “place of memory”, respectively. These approaches have given rise to theoretical currents such as the new social history in which concepts such as “historical memory” have emerged, aimed at defining the need to reconstruct the memory of the oppressed and invisible in post-war or post-democratic societies. Later, the focus of analysis broadened towards the descendants of the survivors, giving rise to avenues of study such as post-memory (Hirsch, 1997, 2004, 2012), within Cultural Studies; or the transgenerational transmission of trauma (Abraham and Torok, 1994; Young, 1997; Volkan, 1998 and 2004), in the field of psychology and psychiatry.

Many of these theoretical frameworks have been applied to the Spanish case. Without wishing to be exhaustive, the work carried out on memory in Spain by psychology and psychiatry (Armañanzas Ros, 2009; Marín and Hernández, 2011; Valverde, 2014), as well as by other fields such as social studies, philosophy, and history (Aguilar, 2001; Reyes Mate, 2003; Cuesta, 2008). Alongside these, we cannot ignore those carried out by specialists in Spanish culture and literature. Some of them have explored the construction of memory in novels, short stories or comics (Winter and Resina (eds.), 2005; Quílez and Rueda (eds.), 2017), others have examined the links between literature and collective memory (Colmeiro, 2005; Labanyi, 2007), and we also find critical voices to some of these theoretical concepts and their usefulness in explaining Spanish history and memory (Faber, 2014).

This dossier seeks to bring together essays that examine the role of poetry in Spain as archive, testimony, and resistance to oblivion over the last 50 years. It will explore how poetic creation continues to be a vital space for dialogue between memory and identity, across diverse voices and generations.

Thematic lines:

•  Lyrical testimonies of the war, exile, dictatorship, and return after 1975.
• Poetry and resistance: the preservation of memory in the face of Franco's historical manipulation.
•  Poetry and post-memory in the 20th and 21st centuries.
•  Poetry in the face of the amnesia of the Transition.
•  Poetry as an affiliative act in democracy.
•   Poetry, historical memory, and political vindication after 1975. 
•   Places of memory and spaces of remembrance in poetry.

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