Dr Marta Simo-Comas

My research interests lie principally in Peninsular twentieth-century fiction, especially from the 1980s to the present. I wrote my PhD, and a subsequent monograph, on the works of the Spanish writer José Luis Sampedro (1917-2013), focusing on characterization through the interchange between story (in its temporal and spatial dimensions) and discourse and situating this within the broader context of the Western novel and the symbolic tradition.

In 2016 I contributed to a documentary, produced by Radio Nacional de España, celebrating Sampedro’s significance as a writer and as a thinker.

More recently I have written on the works of other contemporary authors, such as José María Merino (b. 1941), Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945) and Marta Sanz (b.1967).

My research covers four major areas:

• contemporary Spanish narrative
• the nature of narrative, metafiction, realism, the continuity of literary and conceptual traditions and the survival of universal symbolic motifs and myths in contemporary fiction
• the uncanny in contemporary narrative
• the publishing industry and cultural policies during the Spanish Transition to Democracy.