Project description
A study on literary censorship in Iberian dictatorships
In the 20th century, literary censorship under the Salazar (Portugal) and Franco (Spain) regimes repressed authors and their works. However, the extent of censored books remains unclear. The ERC-funded DESCENSURA (‘decensorship’) project aims to map and analyse book censorship comparatively, contrasting regime propaganda with writer resistance and identifying literary works in need of restoration. The research focuses on poetry, a genre that often eluded censors. The project studies how poets were targeted between 1933 and 1978, and how this legacy lives on today. It seeks to mitigate the damage caused by the state apparatus by ‘decensoring’ works and providing a degree of justice. Furthermore, it will develop the 'Censura' database, which will provide the first authoritative resource on Iberian book censorship.
Objective
In the 20th century, the literary field underwent severe repression and censorship from Salazar’s and Franco’s dictatorships. Despite relevant studies, there is no full account of how these two censoring systems evolved along with common ideology but diverse praxis. Besides, the total number of books forbidden or expurgated during this period is still unknown. This project maps out and systematizes knowledge of book censorship in a comparative way, by contrasting the regimes’ propaganda with writers’ resistance, and by identifying literary works that need to be restored today. Within this large map of censored books, it will examine more closely the case of poetry, as a genre that evaded the censor’s eye. DESCENSURA aims at undoing part of the damage inflicted by the censorial apparatus, thus “decensoring” works and providing a degree of justice. DESCENSURA is foundational research that combines archival and digital methods with literary studies. The project gathers evidence from the legal, secret, and cultural documents that relate to the authors and books marked by censors. It then maps out the networks comprised of author, book, and censor review by digitally emulating these relations in a new database: Censura DB. This database will be the team’s main research tool and the first authoritative resource on Iberian book censorship. The project’s research is divided into four streams: 1) Archives, 2) Ideals, 3) Tactics, and 4) Traces. The traces left by dictatorial regimes are both immaterial and material, pertaining to the control, surveillance, repression, and censorship of writers. Yet the material traces left by censors in the manuscripts, proofs, and books they read can be made visible and relevant. That is this project’s task. It is the first-ever study to map out all the titles censored by the Iberian dictatorships and to investigate the original copies scarred by state agents, thus pioneering knowledge of the legacy of preventive and repressive censorship.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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0313 Oslo
Norway
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