The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation’s past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco’s death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation’s political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.

This is the first monograph on the performance and reception of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century national drama in contemporary Spain, which attempts to remedy the traditional absence of performance-based approaches in Golden Age studies. The book contextualises the socio-historical background to the modern-day performance of the country’s three major Spanish baroque playwrights (Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina), whilst also providing detailed aesthetic analyses of individual stage and screen adaptations.

"The analysis of Rodríguez Méndez's work from the late 1950s to the mid-70s is enriched by detailed evidence from censors' reports, providing fascinating case studies of the unpredictability of censorship under a dictatorial regime. Some of the most powerful plays banned during that time have been revived since 1975, and the book includes discussion of these influential productions. All quotations in Spanish are translated into English."--Back cover.

He demonstrates how these novelists use major and marginal figures to reflect upon the ways that institutional powers invoke episodes from the discovery and conquest to legitimate the present, and also to critique the recent historical past, especially in the case of Uruguay and Argentina, which endured military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s."--Jacket.

La referencia goyesca que da título al libro supone un retrato académico y personal del profesor Leonardo Romero, a quien un grupo de colegas y discípulos ofrece esta colección de estudios: compromiso con la investigación filológica y la transmisión del saber de forma permanente. Las aportaciones reunidas abordan líneas de trabajo que él ha seguido con excelencia: para empezar, el siglo XIX, con atención prioritaria al romanticismo y a la novela realista; pero también, a la historiografía de la literatura, los epistolarios y las literaturas del yo, y las relaciones entre lo literario y las artes visuales.