Legacies of War and Dictatorship in Contemporary Portugal and Spain

This multi-authored volume offers the first extensive exploration of cultural memory in Portugal and Spain, two countries that are normally studied in isolation from one another due to linguistic divergences. The book contains an important theoretical survey of cultural memory today and a comparative analysis of the historical background influencing studies of memory in the Iberian Peninsula. It includes the work of eleven specialists on contemporary Spanish and Portuguese history, culture and literature and establishes a series of parallel themes that lace the chapters together: resistance; literary and popular representations of the figure of the dictator; gender; intergenerational links and changing paradigms of war stories; and the performance of memory. The essays gathered here will be of interest to scholars of both national cultures as well as those concerned with issues of memory, trauma and the historical legacy of war and dictatorship.