Description

The Digital Map of Iberian Literary Relations proposes an interdisciplinary approach to literary studies. Its fundamental objective is to present a geographic visualization of existing interconnections between cultures of the Iberian Peninsula, while transcending pre-established national divisions and openly and interactively showing the links between all peninsular cultural spaces.

The chosen period for the project is comprehended between the years 1868, time of the “Glorious” Spanish Revolution, which had important repercussions on writers of both sides of the border, and 1936, the starting year of the Spanish Civil War, a historical event that radically transformed the relations between the different cultural regions in the peninsula. This project thus attempts a perspective of this moment of the Iberian Peninsula’s literary history away from the textual, narrative, chronological and national teleological constraints of traditional literary history, therefore allowing a comprehensive understanding of the centers of production, distribution, reception and institutionalization of the literatures of the time, as well as the networks of relations (personal, institutional, of publishers) that link them together.

Through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the Digital Map of Iberian Literary Relations intends to identify, locate, visualize and analyze the intersection points between Iberian cultural systems: the publications, institutions, events, meetings, translations, agents and texts that actively promoted approximations between different cultural regions in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the authors who were central in those intersections. We consider this to be the most adequate way (with limitations that we shall discuss later on) of representing, in a cartographic, visual form, a very diverse group of editorial, biographical, cultural and literary phenomena, while also including the literal and figurative dislocations through the Iberian space, as well as the crossings of political, linguistic and cultural borders. The project hopes, in the end, to open paths for new studies by allowing them to correlate information that we think has not yet been linked, in spite of not being unknown.