The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation's past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco's death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation's political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.

By Carey Kasten

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Autonomizing the Calderonian Auto Sacramental
Section I: Tradition Revised: The Auto Sacramental in the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter One: The Avant-Garde Rediscovery of the Auto
Reviving the Calderonian Auto: An Avant-Garde Project
Rewriting the Auto: The Aesthetic Turns Political
Chapter Two: Francoism and the Auto as Political Mouthpiece
Restoring the Auto: From the Battlefield to a National Theater
Recalling the Fascist Auto: Miguel Hernández and Gonzalo
Torrente Ballester Search for Autoridad
Section II: Tradition Overthrown: The Auto Sacramental in the Post-Franco Era
Chapter Three: Subverting Tradition: Francisco Nieva and His Sacred Irreverence
Chapter Four: Emerging from Darkness: National and Theatrical Revision in Jesús Campos García's A ciegas
Chapter Five: The Auto Industry: Anti-Commercialism and the Plays of Ernesto Caballero
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author