Why George? Hagiographic Elements in Matute’s Primera memoria
Since its publication in 1960, Ana María Matute’s novel, Primera memoria, has earned substantial amounts of scholarship and a place in the canon as it pertains to Spanish Peninsular literature of the twentieth century. Its continued relevance has much to do with its discursive and thematic richness, fruitfully explored by readers. Primera memoria takes place on the island of Mallorca during the first months of the Spanish Civil War. Among other topics, its fourteen-year-old narrator, Matia, alludes to class tensions, youthful rivalries, feelings of estrangement, her love of fairy tales, mysterious adults, the conversos known as chuetas, expectations for girls, and unsettling violence. Studies of the text have examined it principally as a bildungsroman and a political allegory, centering on aspects such as Biblical motifs, symbols, archetypes, myths, female adolescent development and so on. One prominent element, however, has not received sustained attention—the legend of St. George, both as set forth in medieval hagiography and as manifested in folk customs. The present article seeks to pursue this line of inquiry: in view of the enigmatic character named Jorge de Son Mayor and the repeated references to San Jorge at the local church: how does parsing the saint’s tradition inflect and enrich our readings of Matute’s book? In other words, why George?
XV.—The Legend of Saint George; Its Development Into a Roman d'Aventure
It is a well known fact that the ground-work of the story of Saint George as told by Richard Johnson in his Seven Champions of Christendom is represented by the Old French, or better the Early English, story of Sir Beves of Hamtoun. The object of this article is to determine the history of the fusion of the two traditions. When Saint George had become the champion of the English knights during the third crusade, the official sanction being given at Oxford in 1222, it is not difficult to understand why the story of his life should have passed into a new phase of its development. Before the crusades only the legend of his martyrdom was known in Western Europe. There, however, he had always been represented as a warrior, ‘miles egregius,’ and now during these expeditions he became the battle saint, whose timely aid brings victory to the Christian armies.
Documenta: Interviews with Ana María Matute and Carme Riera
The aim of the interviews with Ana Mar ṍ a Matute and Carme Riera was to deepen my understanding of how social exclusion in Spanish society between 1936 and the 1990s—a period of dramatic social and political change—was represented in their  ction, especially Matute’s Primera memoria (1960) and Algunos muchachos (1968), and Riera’s Te dejo el mar ( rst published in Catalan in 1975) and Contra el amor en compañṍ a y otros relatos (published in Catalan and in Spanish in 1991). Matute (b.1926) and Riera (b.1948) belong to different literary generations, which offers a rewarding contrast between the different ways in which their work re ects cultural truths about how women and other groups such as children, the old and the poor, were and still are excluded from the mainstream of society. The interviews were for my MA dissertation (Queen Mary and West eld College, University of London) on the theme of social exclusion analysed in the light of socio-politica l change and gender theories.