Memories That Won't Desert. Transnational Legacies of Francoism and the Spanish Civil War in 21st Century Novel, Comic and Film.

This dissertation examines contemporary representations of Francoism and the Spanish Civil War and emphasizes the Republican legacy in three different media: novel, comics, and film. Its main focus is Spain, but my corpus also includes the experience of French and Mexican exiles. These works, produced for the most part by descendants of Republicans in diverse sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, establish a memorial network that goes beyond national boundaries, and that travels from generation to generation. I define the production of second and third generations who recuperate individual stories that have been repressed politically as “legacy narratives.” I argue that because these texts reveal individual legacies of the vanquished and indicate how memories are passed on, they actively participate to collective processes of remembrance. This project contributes to Peninsular, Memory and Cultural Studies. Its aim is to provide a broad enough understanding of legacy narratives in visual and written productions. My corpus includes novels (Lydie Salvayre’s "Pas pleurer," Jordi Soler’s "Los rojos de ultramar"), a graphic novel (Kim and Altarriba "El arte de volar") and two films (Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis’ "Els nens perduts del Franquisme," Juan Carlos Medina’s "Insensibles") to highlight the active dialogue that takes place around questions of transmission regardless of the media or context of production involved. Despite formal differences, I show that legacy narratives rely on collective approaches to memory and transgenerational transmission as a way to give voice to the vanquished, substitute and subvert “institutionalized” practices of collective memory.