It is generally assumed that Marxist revolutionary platforms were, in the wake of Generalísimo Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, fatally eroded by government decentralization, a burgeoning civil society, and a medium-level welfare state. These phenomena made the expression of Spain’s substate national identities less belligerent as they advanced by other means the technocratic and timidly cosmopolitan mind-set that informed Franco’s later administrations. The present essay explores the differential and dissenting sensibilities of key authors who during the period under study wrote in Galician, continued to identify with their homeland’s right of self-determination, and insisted on foregrounding its areas of socioeconomic exclusion and underdevelopment. This discussion centers on Manuel María’s use of his poetry to mobilize popular-democratic politics in the 1970s and takes as its point of departure the contrasting contents found in two important anthologies with deceptively similar titles: J. M. Castellet’s culturalist Nueve novísimos poetas españoles (1970) and María Victoria Moreno Márquez’s politically inflected Os novísimos da poesía galega (1973), which vindicates agrarian communities and vernacular expression.
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Research Article|
December 01 2014
Manuel María’s Agrarian Poetry, Galician Literature, and Spain’s Democratic Transition
Modern Language Quarterly (2014) 75 (4): 541–575.
Citation
José María Rodríguez García; Manuel María’s Agrarian Poetry, Galician Literature, and Spain’s Democratic Transition. Modern Language Quarterly 1 December 2014; 75 (4): 541–575. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2796897
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