The insurmountable filter of time and history: the hundred years of literature from 1898-1936 in the Boletín de la Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo

Abstract

If something characterizes the presence of the literature of 1898-1936 during the first hundred years of life of the Menéndez Pelayo Library Bulletin, it is the filter imposed by the present time and the vicissitudes of history; a filter that for more than half a century establishes silence in the face of what is current, also because the weight of historicity and the golden 16th and 17th centuries make literary criticism a primarily philological and historicist task, faithful to the school that With each issue of the Bulletin he remembers his mentor, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. As we will observe, the retrospective of the literature in the period of study that has been attributed to us is characterized by reviewing contemporary materials in its early decades, especially with some literary creations that were paraded there, and by analyzing creative corpus of authors, many in life or that had been part of almost immediate history. From a conjunctural point of view, it is also difficult to escape the weight of censorship and exile in the second decade of the 20th century or to ignore the compromised nature of a part of the literary creation of the End of the Century to the Republic, which was considered as dissident during the Franco regime. It is also impossible to forget the own appropriation or the rejection that during Francoism was made of some authors.