Peadar O’Donnell’s Reportage on the Spanish Civil WarBetween Journalism and Fiction
- María Ferrández San Miguel (coord.)
- Claus-Peter Neumann (coord.)
Publisher: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza ; Universidad de Zaragoza
ISBN: 978-84-16723-51-5
Year of publication: 2018
Pages: 97-104
Congress: Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. Congreso (40. 2016. Huesca)
Type: Conference paper
Abstract
Scholars have usually established a difference between journalism and fiction, one providing information, news and “truthful facts”, the other being the product of an author’s imagination. Nevertheless, sometimes writers blur the boundaries between journalism and literature, between “referentiality” and “fabulation” in a variety of areas, such as literary journalism, cultural commentary or sketch writing. This is relevant for our understanding of the many reportage books on the Spanish Civil War, which have sometimes been used as sources for the historiography of the period. This paper focuses on one of these reportage books, Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937) by the Irish socialist activist and writer Peadar O’Donnell, and examines the degree of referentiality or fabulation this text shows when trying to present an accurate and truthful picture of the Spanish war.