Diego Santos-Sánchez: The Other Civil War: Representations of War in the Theatre of the 1939 Republican Exile (AvH-Alumni-Program)

This project puts the focus on the theatrical production of the 1939 Republicanexiles, i.e. those who fled Spain at the end of the Civil War. In their texts, theseauthors provide theatrical depictions of the recent conflict they had lived. Thismakes these literary reconstructions of the war unique for three main reasons:firstly, because the authors themselves lived the war and their testimonies arethus first-hand, as opposed to later literary texts by second-/third-generation;secondly, because they were shaped in exile, that is, free of the constraintsimposed by censorship, as happened in Spain; thirdly, because theatreproposes, by virtue of its nature, depictions of war very different from thoseprovided by narrative genres, which have virtually gathered all academicscholarship. This project departs from Literary and Theatre Studies and engageswith Memory Studies to provide a thorough account of how exile theatredepicted the Civil War and to unpin the rationale behind the various aestheticalways in which this task was carried out.