Fact and Fiction

This study examines a varied corpus of documentary and literary texts produced during the miners' revolution of October 1934 in Asturias. It demonstrates how a set of writers, whether authors by profession, politicians, intellectuals, or workers, responded to the most important episode of working-class revolutionary action in Asturias before the Civil War. The object is to consider the diverse factual and fictional textual representations of the critical events of October 1934 within the context of debates in Spain regarding politically committed literature and the avant-garde, and in particular to confirm the validity of the term 'non-fictional novel', prevalent in accounts of North American new journalism in the 1960s.