Canon, fascismo y pedagogíael manual de literatura española para educación secundaria (1940–44) de Ernesto Giménez Caballero

Abstract

This article analyses Ernesto Giménez Caballero’s didactic approach to Spanish literature as displayed in the textbooks that he prepared in his role as a teacher in a school of secondary education in Madrid in the 1940s. A well-known author, famous for his multiform career as an essayist, novelist, journalist, diplomat and poster designer, after the Civil War he wrote a series of volumes which describe the specific path of a subject, Spanish literature, conforming a canon intrinsically related to the notion of Hispanidad (Spanishness/Spanish Identity), employed to contribute to the intellectual and ideological support of the new Francoist state. Temporal suspension and spatial expansion typical within formulations of Hispanidad enter into dialogue with a previous historiographical tradition, and the model designed by Giménez Caballero is an invaluable testimony for analysing the application of Fascism to literary education as effectuated in Spain in a specific context: the one dominated by the complex struggle of symbolical legitimacies during the first decades of the Francoist regime.