(Re)writing the Spanish Civil War: The ironic collision of fiction, non-fiction, and fantasy in four novels at the new millennium

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) constitutes one of the most definitive events of twentieth-century Spain, leaving the nation with a complex legacy of memory and silence. After decades of censorship under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and the self-censorship of the Transition to democracy, the Civil War has exploded with visibility and profitability in the literary realm at the turn of the millennium. This dissertation explores the intersection of historical memory, with its inherent ethico-political considerations, and the postmodern destabilization of authority in four novels from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chapters one and two examine the blurring of generic lines between fiction and non-fiction in Soldados de Salamina (2001) by Javier Cercas and Mala gente que camina (2006) by Benjamin Prado, while chapters three and four deal with the juxtaposition of reality and fantasy in El lapiz del carpintero (1998) by Manuel Rivas and Rabos de lagartija (2000) by Juan Marse. Each of these texts is self-aware with regard to memory and textuality, depicting how the traumas of war and postbellum oppression are recovered, negotiated, and reconstructed in the present, not as a function of personal experience, but rather through their various narratives. The central element of this dissertation lies in its treatment of the way in which irony, a leitmotiv of each novel, frames the self-consciously literary approach to history. These texts employ the ambivalent properties of irony in order to establish points of tension between seemingly paradoxical poles, with regard to what is remembered and how it is remembered, without rejecting either premise. In essence, the irony behind these narratives allows them to suggest that Spain's violent past is both absolutely necessary and determinative, and wholly inaccessible without its mediated, and thus problematic, traces in the present