- novela rosa
- Literally the "rose-coloured novel", this genre is the Spanish equivalent of Mills and Boon or Barbara Cartland. It had a considerable vogue in the 1920s and 1930s, and was given a new lease of life by the work of Corín Tellado, who began writing in 1946 and continued into the late 1990s. Its typical format is that of a short volume of about 100 pages, which lends itself to rapid assimilation by the reader and a high level of demand for new titles. Romantic but reticent, charged with sexual tension but shrinking from explicitness, and with the inevitable happy ending, it was particularly successful during the Franco regime, when hardship, repression and the general impoverishment of cultural life created what has been aptly described as the "culture of evasion". Even after the abolition of censorship, improvements in education, and the general increase in demand for more complex and sophisticated material, there is clearly still a market for literature which offers escapism and entertainment. In this respect, though largely dismissed by critics as an inferior genre, the novela rosa constitutes an important sociological phenomenon, analogous to the television soapopera and the fotonovela. Furthermore, it reflects the increasing commercialization of all cultural products in the 1990s: titles from the 1940s and 1950s are not infrequently reissued in new covers, and form a sizeable proportion of the material referred to collectively as kiosk literature.Further reading- Hooper, J. (1995) The New Spaniards, Harmondsworth: Penguin (chapters 21 and 24 give an excellent overview of the cultural changes of the 1970s and 1980s).- Juana, J.M. de (1998) "Novelas a destajo", Cambio 16 15 June: 60–3 (a useful brief overview of the life and work of Corín Tellado, one of the major exponents of the genre).EAMONN RODGERS
Encyclopedia of contemporary Spanish culture. 2013.
