Press, Propaganda and Politics (PDF)

This collective work aims to compare media (and in particular cultural press) in Francoist Spain and Communist Romania, placing the two opposing paradigms in a common approach with the intention of identifying shared patterns and intricate connections between them, but, at the same time, without ignoring their radical differences. This comparison is performed both explicitly, through several chapters focusing on the general methodological implications of such a comparison between Francoist Spain and Communist Romania in the development of totalitarian / dictatorial propagandistic systems; and implicitly, by offering the academic frame to a series of case studies from both regimes. The contributors to this volume - Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and Romanian scholars - approach several aspects of media in relation to politics, propaganda, historical or social aspects in the two regimes, based on their academic backgrounds: history, cultural studies, media and literature. The volume intends to suggest - through its collection of general, comparative or analytic chapters, as well as through a new approach on two political and cultural phenomena otherwise studied as opposing paradigms - the need for a larger debate on the potential of the approach to these phenomena in a common framework.