Dr Marta Simo Comas

Biography

Dr. Marta Simo Comas is currently working as a Lecturer in Spanish Culture in the Department of Modern Languages and European Studies, University of Reading , United Kingdom Responsibilities I am the Outreach lead for Modern Languages. Teaching I convene and teach SP2MCN (Spanish Modern and Contemporary Narratives). My research covers four major areas: (a) contemporary Spanish narrative; (b) the nature of narrative, metafiction, realism, the continuity of literary and conceptual traditions and the survival of universal symbolic motifs and myths in contemporary fiction; (c) the uncanny in contemporary narrative; (d) the publishing industry and cultural policies during the Spanish Transition to Democracy. I welcome proposals from prospective doctoral students with an interest in any of the areas of my research interests outlined above. Research groups / Centres I am a member of the international network ‘Prácticas culturales y esfera pública: editoras españolas latinoamericanas contemporáneas / Cultural Practice and Public Sphere: Contemporary Spanish and Latin American Female Publishers’, funded by Spain´s Ministry of Education and Culture and led by Dr Pura Fernández, based at the CSIC. Qualifications Lic.Fil. (Universitat de Barcelona) Ph.D. (Exeter)

Research Interest

Areas of Interest My research interests lie principally in Peninsular Twentieth-Century fiction, especially from the 1980s to the present. I wrote my PhD, and a subsequent monograph, on the works of the Spanish writer José Luis Sampedro (1917-2013), focusing on characterization through the interchange between story (in its temporal and spatial dimensions) and discourse and situating this within the broader context of the Western novel and the symbolic tradition. In 2016 I contributed to a documentary, produced by Radio Nacional de España, celebrating Sampedro’s significance as a writer and as a thinker More recently I have written on the works of other contemporary authors, such as José María Merino (b. 1941), Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945) and Marta Sanz (b.1967).