Introduction

Almudena Grandes is one of Spain’s foremost women’s writer, having sold over 1.1 million copies of her episodios de una guerra interminable, her six-volume series that ranges from the Spanish Civil War to the democratic period. This monograph situates Grandes’ major historical postmillennial novels Los aires difíciles and El corazón helado, and four volumes of her six-part series (Los episodios de una guerra interminable: Inés y la alegría, El lector de Julio Verne, Las tres bodas de Manolita and Los pacientes del doctor García) within manifold conceptual categories in memory, philosophical and gender studies that illuminate hidden dimensions of her much-studied work. I have selected these particular works because they respond to key and heretofore unanalysed themes in her historical novels, such as perpetrator memory, and different aspects of gender memory.

More broadly, this analysis seeks to establish Spain, a nation previously thought to have only a nascent perpetrator memory, as an infinitely more sophisticated national phenomenon, and a major force in the European canon of cultural perpetrator memory. Premised on a wide-ranging theoretical framework that ranges from fashion studies to psychology, it aims to provide a new insight into perpetrator memory itself, which is demonstrated to be a relational phenomenon, intimately connected with affect, gender, the family, and personal relationships.

Similarly, it seeks to challenge defeatist perceptions of victimhood by offering a new vision of the Republican victim as a vulnerable subject who seeks to flourish in inimical circumstances, which causes us to revalorise resilience in studies of victimhood

In this introduction, I verse on Almudena Grandes’ trajectory and unpack her literary influences, particularly her indebtedness to Benito Pérez Galdós. I proceed to assess the various criticisms leveled at her work and provide new interpretations for the salience of the emotions and agency in her work. I then examine the socio-cultural context of gender and perpetrator memory, outline the theoretical reformulation of the victim in her novels, and, finally, the chapters are summarised.