War at the Margins: Liminality in Ramiro de Maeztu’s Chronicles from the First World War

Abstract

Spanish journalist and essayist Ramiro de Maeztu (1874-1936) wrote a high number of texts about the First World War. He was sent five times to the front as a war correspondent, always attached to the British army. The chronicles he wrote are complex texts that fixate on spaces that are peripheral to the actual fighting (such as hospitals, warehouses and training fields), thus destabilizing the traditional framework of what constitutes the centre and what constitutes the margins of a war. Maeztu’s own condition as a citizen from a neutral country who strongly sympathized with one of the sides of that war also created important tensions within the narrative voice of his chronicles. This encourages us to study these texts as examples of marginal and liminal writing.