Summary: | Evelyn Waugh’s experiences as captain in the Second World War
represented the raw material for several novels, such as Put out More Flags (1942),
Men at Arms (1952) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). These novels depict, on the
one hand, the experiences of once immature bright young people who are now
confronting the war reality, and, on the other, they satirize the military
bureaucracy and portray the nostalgia for the conservative age of Catholic
English nobility, which disappeared during the war. It could be assumed that
these three novels might have been well received in Franco’s Spain as the
Catholic theme as well as Waugh’s right-wing conservative beliefs could have
influenced the censors’ approval or disapproval. Thus, the present paper will
analyse the reception in Spain of Put out More Flags, Men at Arms and Brideshead
Revisited considering the reports enclosed in the censorship files guarded at AGA
(General Archive of the Administration) in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid. These
documents reveal that Waugh’s novels were not easily approved by the Spanish
censors during the Francoist dictatorship.
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