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This new study investigates how Spain was represented in Irish fiction, plays, poems and travelogues written in a period covering the first five decades of Irish independence as well as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975).

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This new study investigates how Spain was represented in Irish fiction, plays, poems, and travelogues written in a period covering the first five decades of Irish independence, as well as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975). These two countries situated at Europe´s western periphery followed a similar socio-political trajectory in the twentieth century, despite the crucial difference that democracy survived the civil war in Ireland, but not in Spain. Both De Valera´s Ireland and Franco´s Spain were marked by a Catholic conservative-nationalist state ideology and by economic, political, and cultural isolation throughout the 1940s and 1950s, but underwent a rapid process of modernization from the 1960s onwards. Against this historical background, and drawing on the useful theoretical concepts of imagology, the author analyses a variety of literary depictions of life in Spain and explores what the writers´ "hetero-images" of Spain reveal about their "auto-images" of Ireland. The book demonstrates how Irish writers used Spain and its troubles as a foil for Ireland, in order to comment obliquely on socio-political developments in their own country since the achievement of independence.

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CONTENTS: Images of Spain in Irish Literature, 1922-1936 - Images of the Spanish Civil War in Irish Literature, 1936-1939 - Images of Franco´s Spain in Irish Literature, 1939-1975.

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Ute Anna Mittermaier holds a PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin. She has published essays on the representation of Spain and the Spanish Civil War in the works of Irish writers, including Kate O´Brien, Peadar O´Donnell, Charles Donnelly, Maura Laverty, and Aidan Higgins. She currently works as an English teacher and lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien.

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