On Semiosphere and the Nachleben of Monstrosity in Spanish Civil War Literature

In this article, we will reflect upon the narratives and discourse of the contra natura, the extraordinary and the terrifying and its presence in Spanish Civil War literature. Drawing on Lotman ' s notion of semiosphere (1990) as "the space of the safe" and as boundary with alterity, we aim to contextualize monster narratives and the rhetorical construction of otherness of Spanish Civil War and early Francoism as part of a cultural tradition of larger extent, where the monster (monstrum) is used as a defining element, edge of normality and as a delimitating artefact. Considering "lexical arsenals" (Rivas Venegas, 2020) and "Snarl words" (Hayakawa, 1939) as key elements in the elaboration of terrifying images of the other, a selection of different literary materials coming from diverse contexts will allow us to illustrate the "post -life" or "survival" -nachleben, in a strictly Warburgian sense- of monster archetypes, iconographies and representations of otherness present in Spanish putschist discourse during the war and in early Francoist literature.