How to cover the complex, prolific and ever-changing Spanish literary 20th century with a few names? We have asked 8 prestigious current Spanish publishers to choose their 8 books from the last century.

A meticulous and personal selection where the great undeniable names of our literature are combined with less obvious bets and with some absences. And it is that, as the teacher George Steiner said, "in relation to the canonical, scruples and ecstasy are only one".

"It is essential to know canonical literature if we want to learn to hear, to see, to think, to feel ...", affirmed the great literary canonizer of the last decades, Harold Bloom, whose omnipresent selection of The Western Canon (1994) caused so many and so diverse controversies that, repentant and overcome, he came to point out that "the canon is not there to support democratic ideals and establish morality." And it is that for years that vision of a single, hierarchical and closed corpus is on the way to extinction due to the opening of new readings and more integrating visions of literary reality.

Does that mean that the canon is no longer valid as a way of understanding and approaching literature? A few weeks ago El Cultural published an unpublished canon by the last great European literary sage, George Steiner, where the thinker summarized that the canon of a culture "is crystallization, the individually internalized collection of remembered texts, the 'great books', around which a language and a society build their codes of self-recognition”. Following this vision, editor Constantino Bértolo explains in his book Who Are We? 55 Spanish books of the twentieth century, which Periférica Will publish in the coming days, that "literature is one of the tools that society uses to build its identity, a semantic mirror in which to recognize itself."

Read more here: EL CULTURAL