La obra de Francisco Valdés, un escritor extremeño de la Edad de Plata

Abstract

In this PhD dissertation, I analyse both the vital and literary trajectories of Francisco Valdés Nicolau (1892-1936), an Extremaduran Silver Age author. Specifically, Valdés’s literary career is scrutinised from different viewpoints, such as his work as a literary critic, his political and cultural writings, his poetry and his aphorisms. To do so, his press collaborations (for both newspapers and magazines), published and unpublished literary works and other texts, and private correspondence have been examined. The compilation and analysis of these texts constitute an unprecedented but necessary study to fully understand the figure of Valdés against the backdrop of the Spanish Silver context and the Extremaduran literary panorama in the first three decades of the 20th century. The study has been conducted with a corpus of texts made up of both his writings and also texts in which he was mentioned (starting in 1914) and it has been divided into two main parts: creative writing and critical prose. The first part includes an analysis of “4 estampas extremeñas con su marco” (1924) and “8 estampas extremeñas con su marco” (1932), whereas the second covers “Resonancias” (1932) and “Letras. Notas de un lector” (1933). Posthumous texts have also been scrutinised —“Vida y letras” (1980), “Poemas” (no date) and “Cartas de amor de Francisco Valdés a Magdalena Gámir” (1997)—, as well as several unpublished texts and other private documents (private correspondence, mostly) which have contributed to a better understanding of his literary production.