El literato frente a la política: entre el repudio aristocrático, el compromiso militante y la crítica al poder

Abstract

The present paper tackles the conflictive relationship between writers, namely, novelists, and politics, focusing on a period, that of the two world wars and the their postwar years, in which a good number of them took part wholeheartedly in politics, although there was another group who preferred to remain disengaged, because their romantic conception of art and their artistic identity led them to despise the mundane realm of politics. In short, the purpose of this article is to examine the “elective affinities” between an specific artistic conception and identity and the attitude of the writer to politics through the study of seven cases (all of them well-known european writers), divided into two groups that illustrate different to positions and different responses to the conflics generated by the collision between opposing values and loyalties.