Galician Cultural Identity in the Works of Ramn Otero Pedrayo

Description

In the 1920s, the grouping of Galician intellectuals known as the Xeracin Ns began, through their wide-ranging literary output and political activities, to articulate and reinterpret essential notions of Galician cultural identity after several centuries of cultural repression and centralization. This book examines both the nexus of inherited positions informing this cultural recovery, and its original reformulation, through the works of the most prominent intellectual of the Xeracin Ns, Ramn Otero Pedrayo (1888 – 1976). Otero was an important figure in Galician intellectual and cultural life over the larger part of the twentieth century, especially when expression of Galician distinctiveness, whether political or cultural, was severely limited and largely discouraged by the Franco regime. He is particularly deserving of an in-depth study, especially since this theme so intrinsically associated with him has not yet been written upon from a perspective of cultural history, and also given his sheer intellectual versatility and position as the leading cultural anthropologist of that generation of Galician writers and thinkers. This work is, therefore, an intellectual history of the cultural activity prevalent in the northwest of Spain – from 1918 to 1936 and beyond – and its interaction with other notions of Spanish identity.