Abstract/Summary

The work of Marta Sanz is unmistakably critical and dissident in intent, inscribing itself into a wider contemporary movement to restore literature’s role as political statement and social commentary. Rooted in immediate and tangible reality, her novels expose the flaws in the prevailing neo-liberal ideology and question the way in which this conditions collective consciousness and individual experience alike. Taking as its point of departure Marta Sanz’s conception of literature, both as regards its social function and in terms of its aesthetic sense, this article aims to explore those aspects of her work that situate it within a poetics of realism. To this end, the first section of this article, “The Novel is Political”, will examine the themes and conflicts that reveal the nature of the reality represented in her work. The second section, “The Form is Ideological”, will analyse the narrative use of language and its capacity for constructing meaning within the parameters of the realist aesthetic. These approaches together make it possible to establish a line of continuity between her novels, despite the evident formal differences between them.