Somos Galegos: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Regionalist Galician Literature

Since medieval times, Spain’s northwestern region, Galicia, has maintained a distinct language and culture. In this talk, I will give a short historical background of Galicia and then center on a literary movement that developed in this region during the 19th and early 20th centuries. I will present some of this period’s most important writers and their works and show how these writers, which included poets, novelists and historians, resorted to factual and/or fabricated histories to prove their uniqueness from non-Galician Spaniards, and to simultaneously combat Castilian cultural hegemony in the region