W. Fernandez Florez's An Island in the Red Sea: a doubly bitter fruit of the Spanish Civil War

The paper analyses and revalues a novel written during the civil war and about the civil war, a "committed novel" and an actual indictment of the Republic and its men carried from an ideological perspective that - at least as literary history and criticism state - practically nullifies its esthetic value. In particular, my aim here is to emancipate a "propaganda novel" from this reductionist condemn - which, emphasizing its propagandistic character, seems to forget that the writing is dealing with is still a novel -, by uncovering some of those traits ignored by the scholars that allow its esthetic recovery. More broadly, I try to make out of this particular case the starting point of a future literary analysis of the committed novels more deprived of preconceptions.