Abstract
Today the twentieth-century poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca is considered one of the most resonant and emblematic literary voices Spain has ever produced. However, in his time Lorca felt very much alienated from the popular culture: he despised the glorification of war and aggression which he felt was commonplace in his country since the era of the crusades; he identified strongly with his nation’s oppressed populations, especially the gypsy culture that underpinned and permeated his native Andalusia; and he struggled to come to terms with his sexuality in a climate that considered homosexuality unspeakable.
How, then, do we reconcile Lorca’s international identity as a “Spanish” poet with the iconoclasm he was so known for in his own country at the time? By examining the author’s poetry and dramatic works using stylistic analyses -- with an emphasis on register and lexical polysemy informed by the work of Paul Binding and Antonio García Velasco among others -- we can better understand how Lorca deconstructed dominant notions of Spanish identity, becoming in the process an international icon as well as the target for the nationalist forces which assassinated him at the onset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
