Averamientu a la lliteratura n’asturianu al traviés de les publicaciones periódiques lliteraries (1975-2015)

Abstract

The creation of the section «Conceyu Bable» in the Asturias Semanal journal in 1975 marked the beginning of a struggle for an academic tradition and a normalized, learned use of the Asturian language. The strategy would be followed by journals and periodicals of different kinds –many of them specifically literary– that began to use Asturian as a vehicle, which would become an element of differentiation. In these journals, authors used Asturian as their only form of expression, touching upon topics and genres that were unheard of until then in the original native language of Asturias. By offering a periodical and stable publishing space, these journals did not only allow the possibility of exposing the reading public to Asturian, promoting the work of authors that had little chance of being known until then, but they also made it possible to establish a dialogue between the literary community and society as a whole. Thus, they became a tool to spread and normalize the literary production in Asturian, which had hitherto been limited to book editing or condemned to silence. All this makes them an optimal object of analysis, as documents that can illuminate the processes of identity construction associated with linguistic diversity and minority languages. This paper is one of the results of a wider project that has tried to classify all the titles published in Asturian from the period known as Surdimientu onwards. It presents and thoroughly describes the literary journals of the last four decades. In addition to the formal details that identify each issue, it incorporates an analysis of contents and authorship, with the aim of providing exhaustive information about these publications in Asturian. After our analysis, we can conclude that these publishing projects were committed to the use of Asturian as a form of expression, contributing to the feeling of identity associated to the Asturian people and culture.