Virility, fascism and regeneration in post-Civil War Spain: On interpretations of literary Romanticism under the Franco regime

In the years immediately following the Spanish Civil War, the political culture of Falangism developed a deeply gendered regenerationist discourse, which proposed that regeneration would only be possible if the nation recovered its virile attributes. This article focuses on a case study that allows us to better understand this gendered conception of the nation in terms of virility: the discourse developed around the Spanish Romantic writers of the 1830s, a literary movement difficult to incorporate within conceptions of the virile nation. This gained prominence particularly because several centenaries associated with these writers occurred during the war and post-war period.