This collection of new essays examines the representation of the female self in recent novels written by Spanish women. The essays explore the myriad ways in which women's struggle with self-definition and self-fulfillment is contemplated in Spain during a time in which democracy has taken hold and women's rights have taken shape. Authors covered include Carmen Martin Gaite, Josefina Aldecoa, Rosa Montero, Dulce Chacon, Clara Sanchez, Lucia Etxebarria, Care Santos, Eugenia Rico, Espido Freire, and others.
A New History of Iberian Feminisms is both a chronological history and an analytical discussion of feminist thought in the Iberian Peninsula, including Portugal, and the territories of Spain – the Basque Provinces, Catalonia, and Galicia – from the eighteenth century to the present day. The Iberian Peninsula encompasses a dynamic and fraught history of feminism that had to contend with entrenched tradition and a dominant Catholic Church. Editors Silvia Bermúdez and Roberta Johnson and their contributors reveal the long and historical struggles of women living within various parts of the Iberian Peninsula to achieve full citizenship. A New History of Iberian Feminisms comprises a great deal of new scholarship, including nineteenth-century essays written by women on the topic of equality. By addressing these lost texts of feminist thought, Bermúdez, Johnson, and their contributors reveal that female equality, considered a dormant topic in the early nineteenth century, was very much part of the political conversation, and helped to launch the new feminist wave in the second half of the century.
This original collection of essays explores the work and life choices of Spanish women who, through their writings and social activism, addressed social justice, religious dogmatism, the educational system, gender inequality, and tensions in female subjectivity. It brings together writers who are not commonly associated with each other, but whose voices overlap, allowing us to foreground their unconventionality, their relationships to each other, and their relation to modernity. The objective of this volume is to explore how the idea of "queerness" played an important role in the personal lives and social activism of these writers, as well as in the unconventional and nonconformist characters they created in their work. Together, the essays demonstrate that the concept of "queer women" is useful for investigating the evolution of women’s writing and sexual identity during the period of Spain’s fitful transition to modernity in the nineteenth century. The concept of queerness in its many meanings points to the idea of non-normativity and gender dissidence that encompasses how women intellectuals experienced friendship, religion, sex, sexuality, and gender. The works examined include autobiography, poetry, memoir, salon chronicles, short and long fiction, pedagogical essays, newspaper articles, theater, and letters. In addition to exploring the significant presence of queer women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature and culture, the essays examine the reasons why the voices of Spanish women authors have been culturally silenced. One thrust in this collection explores generational transitions of Spanish writers from the romantics and their "hermandad lírica" ("lyrical sisterhood") through to "las Sinsombrero" ("Women Without Hats"), and finally, current Spanish writers linked to the LGBTQ+ community.
This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder’s invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. The contributors study women as agents and representations of social change in a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, plays, personal letters, and journalistic pieces. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas “Clarín,” and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Memory, War, and Dictatorship in Recent Spanish Fiction by Women analyzes five novels by women writers that present women’s experiences during and after the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship, highlighting the struggles of female protagonists of different ages to confront an unresolved individual and collective past. It discusses the different narrative models and strategies used in these works and the ways in which they engage with their political and historical context, particularly in the light of campaigns for the so-called recovery of historical memory in Spain (the “memory boom”) and in the broader context of memory and trauma studies. The novels that are examined in this book are Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002), Rosa Regàs’s Luna lunera (1999), Josefina Aldecoa’s La fuerza del destino (1997), Carme Riera’s La mitad del alma (2005), and Almudena Grandes’s El corazón helado (2007). These works all highlight the multiple nature of memories and histories and demonstrate the complex ways in which the past impacts on the present. This book also considers the extent to which the memories represented in these five novels are inflected by gender and informed by the gender politics of twentieth-century and contemporary Spain.
Applying recent European and Anglo-American feminist scholarship to the problems of gender representation, Charnon-Deutsch challenges the prevailing idea that the 19th-century Spanish novel is woman centered. The author's examination of novels by Valera, Pereda, Alas, and Galdos demonstrates that these works are instead a complex exploration of male identity. Decoding the gender ideology of women's roles, discourse, and representations, Charnon-Deutsch uncovers in the novels multiple configurations of androcentricity as well as voyeuristic tendencies, which she interprets as a means of mastering what is threatening to the male psyche.
This is the first essay collection to examine the relation between text and gender in Spain from a broad geographical, social and cultural perspective covering more than 300 years. The contributors examine women and the construction of gender thematically, dealing with the areas of politics, law, religion, sexuality, literature and economics, and in a variety of social categories, from Christians and Moriscas, queens and merchants, peasants and visionaries, heretics and madwomen. The essays cover different regions in the Spanish monarchy, including Andalusia, Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, Valencia and Spanish America, from the fifteenth century through to the eighteenth century. Women, Texts and Authority in Early Modern Spain focuses on two central themes: gender relations in the shaping of family and community life, and women's authority in spheres of power. The representation of women in a variety of texts such as poetry, court cases, or even account books illustrate the multifaceted world in which women lived, constantly choosing and negotiating their identities. The appeal of this collection is not limited to scholars of Spanish history and literature; it is deliberately designed to address the issue of how gender relations were constructed in the formation of modern society, and therefore will be of interest to scholars of women's and gender history generally. Because of the emphasis on how this construction occurs in texts, the collection will also be attractive to scholars interested in literary studies and/or print culture.
What if the goddess Athena, who sprang fully-grown from Zeus's head and denied she had a mother, became aware of the compelling existence of her other parent? What if she discovered that her mother, Metis,—first wife of Zeus and 'wiser than all gods and mortal men,' according to Hesiod—was swallowed by her father and continued to impart her wisdom to him from inside his belly? Recent Spanish novels by women parallel this hypothetical situation based on Greek myth by featuring female protagonists who obsessively re-examine the lives of their mothers, seeking to know and understand them. In Mother & Myth in Spanish Novels, Schumm examines six narratives by Spanish authors published since 2000 that focus on a daughter's search to know more about her matriarchal heritage: Carme Riera's La mitad del alma, Luc'a Etxebarria's Un milagro en equilibrio, Rosa Montero's El coraz-n del tOrtaro, Cristina Cerezales's De oca a oca, Mar'a de la Pau Janer's Las mujeres que hay en m', and Soledad Puertolas's Historia de un abrigo. In each of these novels, the protagonist realizes that failure to integrate the loss of her mother into her life results in the inability to define herself. Without valorization of the maternal subject, the legacy of the daughter is at risk—she is also objectified and swallowed— and the whole society suffers. The daughters' attention to their mothers in these novels is as if Athena had finally recognized that her mother, Metis, had been ingested by Zeus. The myth of Metis and Athena becomes a metaphor of the daughter's quest toward wholeness and individuation in these works; she begins to understand that her maternal legacy is a source of wisdom that has been obscured. These novels by Spanish women strengthen the mother's voice, rescue her from anonymity, and rewrite the matriarchal archetype.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Mercè Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Mercè Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.
