The Spanish Civil War is a historical phenomenon with major international repercussions. Despite having received (and continuing to receive) sustained scholarly attention, the conflict is the source of an extensive textual network – fictional or otherwise – that has not, to date, been studied with the necessary global perspective. The purpose of this volume is to examine the mechanisms of British-Spanish discourses on the Civil War. The study will thus consider how certain texts determine the conceptualisation, representation, transmission and reception of historical events between the two nations. Examples that have contributed significantly to the shaping of a collective imaginary of what the war was – or could have been – abound both inside and outside the peninsular borders. These include Paul Preston’s widely read monograph, The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, and the translations of Javier Cercas’s novels into English, for instance.
The main aim of this collective work, the product of a collaboration of experts in the historical and literary fields, is to highlight the relevance of discourse as a vector of knowledge and interpretation from an interdisciplinary perspective. In this sense, the analysis encompasses both texts that are contemporaneous to the events, for example, the media coverage or the poems written between 1936 and 1939, as well as their subsequent reformulation in later literary, scientific, and popular discourses.
The book will focus on the following (non-exhaustive) lines of research :
1. Writing the war
- British press and diplomatic documentation disseminated during, and about, the conflict.
- Epistolary correspondence written about the events (with a specific focus on the relationship between Spain and the United Kingdom, e.g. letters from British witnesses or volunteers).
- Translation of texts written during the war: Spanish poems translated into English (and published in the UK) or British texts translated into Spanish between 1936 and 1939.
2. Historiography
- Critical reflection on British studies focused on the Spanish Civil War: outstanding monographs, bibliographical trajectories of eminent researchers (Paul Preston, Helen Graham, Raymond Carr, etc.), publication and research policies, etc.
- Canonical or forgotten texts in British historiography.
- Networks and research projects between the UK and Spain.
3. Literature and collective memory
- Analysis of the representation of British volunteers and correspondents and/or British politics in Spanish texts (from 1939 to the present day).
- Analysis of the representation of the Civil War in British texts.
- Translation and circulation of British fiction books in Spain or Spanish texts in the UK, always on the subject of the Civil War.
- Intertextualities (e.g. Orwell in current Spanish literature).
—
Submission of proposals
The volume coordinator hereby invites any person interested to submit their proposals of 200-400 words as a .docx or .pdf file to the following e-mail address by 15 September 2025: Natacha.crocoll@unige.ch
In the same document, in addition to the proposal, the researchers are required to specify their name and surname, academic affiliation (if applicable), as well as a provisional and indicative bibliography.
Both the proposal and the article have to be written in English and Spanish.
A response will be given before 1 October 2025. The selected authors will then have a deadline of 15 March 2026 to submit their full article (between 30,000 and 50,000 characters, spaces included), which will undergo peer review.
—
Coordination and information
Dr. Natacha Crocoll, Université de Genève: Natacha.crocoll@unige.ch