| This study aims at tracing and evaluating the reception of Virginia Woolf's work in Spain from a diachronic perspective, that is, determining the space she has come to occupy in the Spanish literary scene from her early introduction in the thirties to the present. Such an assessment encompasses an analysis not only of the way in which her literary production has been translated, published and reviewed, but also of the powerful influence she has exerted on Spanish creative writers.; For this purpose, we devised a methodological frame based on a compilation of objective data and texts. Since the response of the Spanish reading public---translators, publishers, scholars and readers---was our main target, we also relied on some of the premises of The Aesthetics of Reception, a literary theory especially concerned with the active role played by the reader in the reception of a literary work. Finally, we took into account the particular Spanish cultural context in which the early diffusion of Virginia Woolf took place, a historical period convulsed by the Civil War, the censorship enforced by Franco's regime and the repression of women in the aftermath of war.; The most outstanding conclusion we reached was that the reception of Virginia Woolf in Spain has expanded in quantity and quality as a consequence of certain factors that have given a new impulse to the appraisal of her life and work. The flourishing of English studies at Spanish universities and of the first associations, together with the expansion of feminism and the emergence of feminist literary criticism in the late seventies, contributed to a wide diffusion of her work. Virginia Woolf has gradually attracted the attention of publishers, critics and readers in Spain, and it is in the last quarter of the twentieth century that she achieved a canonical status, which has culminated in an unprecedented interest in her work and life. The Spanish reception of Virginia Woolf includes a great variety of research projects that have revealed the different facets of this writer, not only the novelist, but also the critic, the essayist, the diarist and finally, the woman. |
