Convocatoria/Call 10th FENIX CONGRESS

Women, Letters, Alliances:
Epistolary Relations of the Spanish Exile (1939-1975)

After the Spanish War (1936-1939) and throughout Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975), correspondence via private letters remained one of the key media of communication bridging the distances between the Spanish intellectuals and artists who went into exile, on the one hand, and their friends and colleagues who remained in Spain, on the other. Moreover, during their nomadic existences in exile, many Spanish exiles made new friends, with whom, after separation, they also constructed an epistolary relationship. While scholars throughout the twentieth century have explored a number of facets related to the correspondence exchanged in the context of the Spanish exile, recent years have seen the publication of several new works on letters written by/to Spanish exiles, especially in the field of women’s correspondences. New archival discoveries, new analytical approaches, and new conceptual frameworks have been the hallmark of this scholarship.

This Congress addresses one main research question: What do the letters sent to/by exiled women writers reveal about the construction of their epistolary relations, professionally (networks and collaborations) and personally (alliances, personal development, friendships)? Drawing on the analysis of private letters sent to/by exiled women writers, the studies compiled in this Issue explore the multiple layers of significance that these letters hold on a professional and a personal level, in dialogue with the rapidly growing scholarly interest in Spanish women exiles’ letters.

This Congress proposes to illustrate the historical value of letters as fundamental in providing access to Spanish women exiles’ interior worlds, to their professional attitudes, ethical values, personal experiences, and intimate fears and hopes, as no other source has the potential to do. From a historical viewpoint, the rewards of working with intimate documents are extraordinary. The letters these exiled women intellectuals wrote and received take us inside the minds of women intellectuals whose personal identities and professional circumstances were most affected by the experience of exile.

Still, this Congress also intends to highlight that letters are more than a source of data. Among the many dimensions of the epistolary relation between exiled women, the studies take a closer look at two of its features. First, the imaginative possibilities of correspondences exchanged in the context of exile are to be shown in this Congress. Imagination has the capacity to overcome the spatial distance that separates the correspondents by creating an imagined, shared space of intimacy and affection in the letters, and by portraying the absent recipient and the self together in this space. The imaginative power of the letters creates a world of interconnection and of being together. In this sense, letters written by/to exiles are a celebration of the potential of imagination as a survival strategy in the context of exile. Second, the Congress’s approach to the spiritual or confessional character of the letters written in exile, shows how the epistolary dialogue can become an instrument of personal development, from self-scrutiny to self- transformation, by which the sender of the letter, stimulated by the figure of the imagined recipient, undertakes a search for truth, meaning, and coherence.