This paper will discuss the current interest in the recent past and the campaigns for the recovery of historical memory in Spain in the context of contemporary cultural production. Many recent works, both literary and cinematographic, challenge official versions of the past, responding to a desire to break the silence and to counter the historical amnesia of recent years. My particular interest is in novels produced by contemporary women writers that foreground the voices and historical experiences of women and children in their explorations of history and memory. My discussion in this paper will focus on Rosa Regās's Luna lunera (1999), and will explore the cultural politics of Regās's novel in terms of contemporary debates about trauma, memory, and the recuperation of the past, examining the ways in which the novel uses the voices of children to undermine official historiographic discourse.

Sarah Leggott is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Spanish Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Auckland in 1999. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Spanish literature and culture, with a particular interest in women writers and autobiographical narratives. She is the author of History and Autobiography in Contemporary Spanish Women's Testimonial Writings (Edwin Mellen Press, 2001) and The Workings of Memory: Life-Writing by Women in Early Twentieth-Century Spain (Bucknell University Press, forthcoming 2008), as well as journal articles on twentieth-century Spanish women writers.