Thematic origins and political content

In the Spanish post-war novel, the term neorealism is used for the reemergence of realist writing, never completely absent even though it had become unfashionable with the Generation of 1898 during the heyday of modernismo and during the so-called vanguardismo characteristic of the Generation of 1927. Neorealism emerges in the work of writers such as José Díaz, dubbed in 1930 the ‘New Romantics’. Reacting against the vanguardist ‘dehumanization’ of art and the advocacy of ‘pure’ art, or ‘art for art's sake’, they felt compelled by the dramatic events of the Civil War to focus once again on social and political realities. Avant-garde writers, consciously elitist and intellectual, had looked down on ‘bourgeois’ taste and produced few novels (a genre still dominated in the eyes of the public by the great authors of the Generation of 1898: Baroja, Azorín, Unamuno, and Valle-Inclán; see above Chapter 1). Not long after this, a number of politically combative pre-war ‘New Romantic’ works appeared, among them La turbina (1930), Los pobres contra los ricos (1933), and Reparto de tierras (1934), all three by César Arconada; Campesinos (1931) and Crimen (1934) from the pen of Joaquín Arderíus, and works by the prolific Ramón Sender, including *Siete domingos rojos (1932), Viaje a la aldea del crimen (1934), and *Mr. Witt en el Cantón (1936). Most of these novels consist of autobiographical, eyewitness accounts or documentaries, politically motivated and socially focused. The Marxist critic Pablo Gil Casado (1973) saw Sender's *Siete domingos rojos as coinciding with the emergence of a ‘real’ social novel in Spain. Many novelists of the Civil War and writers in exile also played a part in the renaissance of critical neorealism.

Although that renaissance under the Franco dictatorship is often credited to the influence of post-war Italian neorealist cinema and verismo (generally deemed itself to be a reaction against an Italian idealized vision of traditional family and gender roles promoted by Fascism, and the result of readers’ rejection of the anti-aesthetic excesses of Fascist triunfalismo), there had been a move in the direction of reportage and sociopolitical writing under the Spanish Republic. Neorealist tendencies can be seen in pre-war narrative (and in poetry and the arts during the war), although post-war social novelists consciously adopted ‘safer’ Italian neorealist cinematic techniques.