María Ayete. A look at representations of rural life in the contemporary Spanish novelverified
María Ayete of the University of Alcalá examines how the Spanish novel of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has portrayed rural life, which experiences it has made visible and which it has left on the margins. The talk challenges the idea of a single rural world and is part of the series of the Muestra de Cine de Lanzarote 2026, at the Antiguo Parador in Arrecife, with free admission.
María Ayete, of the University of Alcalá, starts from a question: what do we mean by rural, and how has that meaning changed? Depopulation, mechanisation, exodus and return, neo-ruralism, tourism, mega-farms, agribusiness and re-urbanisation have created different realities under a single label; the talk argues that there is no single “countryside”, only diverse territories, and traces the Spanish rural novel of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to see what has been made visible and what has been silenced.
It belongs to the “Pueblos” lecture series that leads up to the Muestra de Cine de Lanzarote 2026, organised by the Asociación Tenique Cultural at the Antiguo Parador, the UNED centre in Arrecife. Admission is free. The talk is on Wednesday 4 November 2026 at 19:30.
