Censored discourse in anthologies and collections of the Far West

This paper explores Franco’s censorship of narratives of the Far West published in collections and anthologies. The study was based on a catalogue of 727 censorship files compiled for the Western genre, TRACEniO. 55% of the files corresponded to national popular Westerns (pseudotranslations) published in a standard format in mass-produced collections. The incidence of censorship of the collections was slightly lower than for the TRACEniO overall. Although anthologies of imported American Westerns translated into Spanish were not subjected to any form of cuts or modification under the official censorship procedure, a microtextual analysis of Haycox’s short story, Mrs. Benson, reveals that the translators and/or publishers resorted to self-censorship and applied similar techniques and criteria to those used by the official censors as revealed in the TRACEniO catalogue.