7 - Conclusion

Summary

I wrote in the introductory chapter that, when analysing post-war Catalan fiction, and more specifically the works of Espriu, Benguerel, Sales and Arbó, in general critics have failed to realise that the consequences of the armed conflict affected not only the material conditions under which writers worked, but also the structure, content and style of their novels. This explains why the type of analysis carried out in this book significantly diverges from the way post-war Catalan literature has been studied so far. Instead of exploring the work of an individual author or how the conflict and its consequences were represented at a purely descriptive level, I have chosen to focus on a limited number of texts in order to highlight not only how specific writers, the Catalan literary sphere or society at large were affected by the dictatorship, but the ways in which the irrevocable break marked by the conflict impacted upon the writing process itself. Such an undertaking has required a detailed and systematic analysis of stylistic and thematic choices, and my findings are, therefore, perhaps more limited in scope than prevailing approaches in the field. However, the advantage of this methodology is that it has allowed me to adopt a wider and more diverse theoretical frame and apply a series of concepts which during the last two decades have become of central importance in cultural and literary studies, such as exile, trauma, myth, silence, memory, censorship, chronotope, polyphony, the construction of national identity and the politics of representation.