Triste pais encantado Imagining Portugal in Spanish Essay, Film and Nove

Our experience with a national other is often colored by preexisting ideas about what that nation is like. This study examines the specific case of Spain looking at Portugal and how fixed notions that the Spanish have of Portugal determine cultural production about Portugal. I identify four of the most common stereotypes that Spain has of Portugal, here called macroimages or macro-imagotypes, as defined by the field of Imagology. The four macroimages are that Portugal is an unknown country, Portugal is a sad country, Portugal is an enchanted country, and Portugal is a faraway country in time and space.;Chapter one uses the genre of the literary chronicle to establish the predominance of these particular four macroimages, using chronicles by eighteen well-known Spanish authors (for example, Juan Valera, Emilia Pardo Bazan, Carmen de Burgos, Miguel de Unamuno, Carmen Martin Gaite, Julio Llamazares and Enrique Vila-Matas, among others) who write over a span of one hundred and fifty years. Chapter two takes the macroimages of Portugal as sad and enchanted and examines how these images were revived as part of an Iberianist cultural project after the Second World War. I examine three historical films coproduced between Spain and Portugal: Ines de Castro (Leitao de Barros, 1944), Reina Santa (Rafael Gil, 1947) and La senora de Fatima (Rafael Gil, 1951). The final chapter examines the role of the macroimages of Portugal as unknown and faraway in the recuperation of Spanish memory in the two post-Franco novels, El siglo (Javier Marias, 1983) and El invierno en Lisboa (Antonio Munoz Molina, 1987).;In each case, my conclusion is always that these four macroimages tell us more about the Spain that is producing and consuming them than the Portugal that they claim to describe. All four images reveal Spain's insecurities about its past and present relationship to Portugal and, more importantly, its insufficient relationship to Europe.