"By the end of the Spanish Civil War in March of 1939, almost 500,000 Spaniards had fled Francisco Franco's newly established military dictatorship. More than 275,000 refugees in France were immediately interned in hastily constructed concentration camps, most of which were located along the open shorelines of France's southernmost beaches. This book chronicles the cultural memory of this war refugee population whose stories as camp inmates in the early 1940s remain largely unknown, unlike the wide dissemination of the literature and testimony of the survivors of Nazi death camps. The "hidden history" of France's seaside camps for Spanish Republicans spawned a rich legacy of cultural works that dramatically demonstrate how a displaced political community began to reconstitute itself from the ruins of war, literally from the sands of exile. Combining close textual analyses of memoirs, poetry, drama, and fiction with a carefully researched historical perspective, Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire investigates how the most significant literature of the early post-civil war exile period appropriated the concentration camp as a discursive vehicle." "Spanish Culture behind Barbed Wire argues that in the literature of exile published during the years of World War II, the camps are frequently configured as a kind of construction site for the nation in exile, a place where survivors of civil war begin to inscribe a new national history, as well as reassemble their political identity as fighters for social justice. Cate-Arries examines how the unfamiliar physical space of the beaches in France is ultimately encoded by the camp inmates who inhabit and represent them, as a place of subversion, resistance, and agency. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of exile studies, Spanish Civil War history and the diaspora of the 1939, World War II cultural studies, especially concentration camp testimonies, and the interdisciplinary theoretical fields of representation, collective memory, and national identity. The story of Spanish exile in the concentration camps in France is a piece of twentieth-century Spanish cultural history and memory."--BOOK JACKET.