Most introductions to Basque literature begin with a survey of the language and of present-day Basque society. This is because Basque literature is virtually unknown outside the country and few Basque authors have managed to cross frontiers. But it is also the case that the socio-historical context itself, and particularly the language, have played a large part in shaping the written word.

We are not dealing here with Basque authors of international standing who wrote in Spanish, such as Pío Baroja, Miguel de Unamuno, Gabriel Celaya, Blas de Otero, Ignacio Aldecoa, or Luis Martín-Santos, but of Basque authors who used euskara, the Basque language. Indeed, as Lasagabaster suggests (2002: 24), it would be more appropriate to speak of Basque literatures than of Basque literature, since Basque writers have written and continue to write not only in Basque but also in Spanish and French. It would be fair to say that, in a sense, Basque writers are classified less according to their nationality or place of birth than by the language they choose to write in. As Claudio Guillén says (1995), it is language that serves to differentiate the various literatures and the literary systems that support them. Although the fact of writing in Basque, a pre-Indo-European language (and the most ancient language in Western Europe) currently spoken by some 700,000 people, does not in and of itself present an insurmountable barrier, it is true that the development of literature in Basque has been closely linked to the socio-historical fortunes of the spoken language. In a well-known poem, used as an epigraph to his *Obabakoak (1992), Bernardo Atxaga compares Basque literature to a hedgehog that woke up in the twentieth century after a lengthy period of hibernation.

The most important period of Basque literary history is accordingly the last hundred years; before that, most literature in Basque was religious or written with some other extra-literary purpose in mind. The first signs of letters – came in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Works of religious teaching began to take a back seat and new narrative genres, particularly the novel, burst onto the scene. The disappearance, after the second Carlist war (1873–76), of traditional local legal traditions going back to the early Middle Ages (the so-called Fueros), coincided with the onset of this Basque literary renaissance