This new history extends Modern Spanish literature into the late twentieth century and explores imaginative writings often ignored outside Spain. Extensive treatments of famous names are balanced by discussions of non-canonical and non-literary work. Thematic rather than chronological, the book places its texts in a variety of social, imaginary, and intellectual contexts.

A New History of Spanish Writing, 1939 to the 1990s explores the diversity of some sixty years of imaginative writing by Spaniards, its interactions with Spain's peculiarly dramatic history since the end of its Civil War, and its wider thematic significance. It covers the famous and canonical texts of the most recent in Modern Spanish literature but also explores areas less well-known outside Spain (essays and editorials, queer narrative, new poetry, comics, and texts of the militant and reactionary Right). More space than is usual in literary histories is allowed for commentary on famous texts, but the book also makes room for the marginalized and for socially contextualized explorations of the interconnectedness of various forms of writing. The overall structure is not chronological but thematic, dealing with abstract and topical issues such as silence, the family, or realism.

A coherent overview of the turbulent and challenging conditions in which Spanish writers have managed to publish.