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The twenty-first century 'memory boom' in Spain has resulted in a plethora of narratives in which the Civil War and the early years of Franco's dictatorship feature prominently. Studies of these works have addressed representations of memory and trauma, recognizing how the authors reanimate the past and narrate stories of conflict and loss to a readership distanced from the historical events. This essay explores four texts, identifying the strategies that have shaped their circulation in the current affective economy. Analysis pays particular attention to text, but also explores the image as formative in the reading experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inability to come to terms with traumatic experiences is felt most acutely by the individual, but is also a social phenomenon, perpetuated by the disjunction of an 'official history' and that experienced locally by the individual. In light of the recuperation of Spanish Civil War histories and the need to address the unspoken past, this article focuses on the recent work of Juan Goytisolo, a writer renowned for blurring the autobiographical, the political and the literary. After brief reference to Goytisolo's earlier work, the essay examines three of his more recent novels, La cuarentena (1991), El sitio de los sitios (1995) and Las semanas del jardín (1997), identifying the personal and communal ties to the traumatic past that are realized in Goytisolo's work and revealing the processes by which Goytisolo consciously and unconsciously evokes his past while engaging his readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]