The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater

Representing the Auto Sacramental

By (author) Carey Kasten

Publication date:

10 February 2012

Length of book:

260 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

Dimensions:

235x163mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781611483819

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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Autonomizing the Calderonian Auto Sacramental
Section I: Tradition Revised: The Auto Sacramental in the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter One: The Avant-Garde Rediscovery of the Auto
Reviving the Calderonian Auto: An Avant-Garde Project
Rewriting the Auto: The Aesthetic Turns Political
Chapter Two: Francoism and the Auto as Political Mouthpiece
Restoring the Auto: From the Battlefield to a National Theater
Recalling the Fascist Auto: Miguel Hernández and Gonzalo
Torrente Ballester Search for Autoridad
Section II: Tradition Overthrown: The Auto Sacramental in the Post-Franco Era
Chapter Three: Subverting Tradition: Francisco Nieva and His Sacred Irreverence
Chapter Four: Emerging from Darkness: National and Theatrical Revision in Jesús Campos García’s A ciegas
Chapter Five: The Auto Industry: Anti-Commercialism and the Plays of Ernesto Caballero
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author

This book is a valuable addition to Spanish Drama Studies. Even though Spanish Cultural and Cinema Studies are producing a solid and steady body of work that deals with different aspects of Spanish cultural history, Drama Studies is still a field highly neglected in the area of Literary Studies in general and in the field of the Hispanism in the United States in particular. The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater comes to fill a void in the study of the relationship of culture, ideology and politics in the problematic Spanish twentieth century. . . .The book is very well written; it is clear, concise and straight to the point. Furthermore, it is very pleasant and enjoyable to read. Kasten's chronological approach helps the reader not just to understand the evolution of the auto during the twentieth century but also the ideological transformation of a country which evolved from the democratic experience of the Second Republic to the Civil War and the subsequent fascist dictatorship to the return to democracy in the late 1970s. . . .To sum up, Kasten's book is an indispensable tool for anyone approaching the history of Spanish theatre. Her originality, her thorough analysis and her comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach represent an extraordinary contribution to the field of Spanish Cultural Studies.