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During her lifetime, Gloria Fuertes achieved the status of a controversial cultural icon, both through her poetry for adults and through her poetry, recorded readings, and television programs for juveniles. This collection of lively essays, by authors who specialize in contemporary Spanish poetry, approaches the works of Gloria Fuertes from various theoretical and critical perspectives. In Her Words speaks to the inherent complexity of Gloria Fuertes' poetry, as manifested in its ultimate indeterminacy and indecision, yet attests to this poet's abiding value as the voice of the marginalized-women, the poor, children, all the invisible members of society-who were silenced during the years of Spanish dictatorship under Franco. This book manifests the prescience of Fuertes' stands on a variety of social and cultural issues, from women's changing roles in society, gender and sexuality, identity within a society held captive by a dictatorial regime, to more universal themes such as love, justice, ethics, nature, and obsolete societal norms. In Her Words decisively addresses and ultimately rejects the Spanish cultural elite's inclination to disavow Fuertes' influence and reveals how her voice has shaped succeeding generations of Spanish poets and underscored the ubiquity of her verse in contemporary Spanish literature and culture. The subtlety and diversity of the essays included in this volume attest to the power of Gloria Fuertes' poetic creativity, her ability to appeal to a wide audience both in Spain and abroad, and her place in the contemporary Spanish poetic canon.
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.
The first comprehensive analysis of the novels of prominent contemporary Spanish writer and educator Josefina Aldecoa. Josefina Aldecoa, in her treatment of themes such as a woman's place in society under and after dictatorship, mother-daughter relationships, war, and memory, confirmed her unique role as a contemporary novelist concerned with women's identity in Spain and as a writer of the mid-century generation ('los niños de la guerra'). The first volume of her trilogy, Historia de una maestra, was one of the earliest narratives of historical memory to beproduced in Spain. In this sense, Aldecoa's work anticipated new developments in gender studies, such as the intersection of feminist concerns and cultural memory. This book offers a comprehensive examination of Aldecoa's trajectory as a novelist, from La enredadera to Hermanas, centring on her primary preoccupations of gender and memory, arguing that Aldecoa's fiction offers a new, more complex understanding of women's identity than previously understood. The work combines the two dominating theoretical components of feminism and cultural memory with close textual analysis of Aldecoa's narratives. Her novels highlight the importance of the details of women's daily experiences and struggles throughout the twentieth century, a period of significant socio-political upheaval and change in Spain's history. NUALA KENNY teaches Spanish at the National University of Maynooth, Ireland.
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.
At the end of the Spanish Civil War the Nationalist government instigated mass repression against anyone suspected of loyalty to the defeated Republican side. Around 200,000 people were imprisoned for political crimes in the weeks and months following 1st April 1939, including thousands of women who were charged with offences ranging from directing the home front to supporting their loved ones engaged in combat. Many women wrote and published texts about their experiences, seeking to make their voices heard and to counteract the dehumanising master narrative of the right-wing victors that had criminalised their existence. The memoirs of Communist women, such as Tomasa Cuevas and Juana Doña, have heavily influenced our understanding of life in prison for women under franquismo, while texts by non-Communist women have largely been ignored. This monograph offers a comparative study of the life writing of female political prisoners in Spain, focusing on six texts in particular: the two volumes of Cárcel de mujeres by Tomasa Cuevas; Desde la noche y la niebla by Juana Doña; Réquiem por la libertad by Ángeles García-Madrid; Abajo las dictaduras by Josefa Garcia Segret; and Aquello sucedió así by Ángeles Malonda. All the texts share common themes, such as describing the hunger and repression that all political prisoners suffered. However, the ideologically-driven narratives of Communist women often foreground representations of resistance at the expense of exploring the emotional and intellectual struggle for survival that many women political prisoners faced in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. This study nuances our understanding of imprisoned women as individuals and as a collective, analysing how women political prisoners sought recognition and justice in the face of a vindictive dictatorship. It also explores the women's response to the spirit of convivencia during the transition to democracy, which once again threatened to silence them.
This monograph explores the biographical and autobiographical works of seven 20th-century Spanish women writers: Josefina Aldecoa, Mercedes Formica, Dolores Ibarruri, Pilar Jaraiz Franco, Federica Montseny, Constancia de la Mora, and Isabel Oyarzabal de Palencia. Literary and political figures, these women contest traditional versions of Spanish history through their published works, and offer different perspectives on the role of women within that history. They address the past from diverse ideological standpoints - communism, republicanism, socialism, anarchism and fascism. The text examines the construction of the identity of the female historical subject within a specific sociopolitical context, drawing on relevant critical work from the fields of historicism, feminism and cultural studies.
Women’s life writing in general has too often been ignored, dismissed, or relegated to a separate category in those few studies of the genre that include it. The present work addresses these issues and offers a countervailing argument that focuses on the contributions of women writers to the study of autobiography in Spanish during the early modern period. There are, indeed, examples of autobiographical writing by women in Spain and its New World empire, evident as early as the fourteenth-century Memorias penned by Doña Leonor López de Cordóba and continuing through the seventeenth-century Cartas of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. What sets these accounts apart, the author shows, are the variety of forms adopted by each woman to tell her life and the circumstances in which she adapts her narrative to satisfy the presence of male critics-whether ecclesiastic or political, actual or imagined-who would dismiss or even alter her life story. Analyzing how each of these women viewed her life and, conversely, how their contemporaries-both male and female-received and sometimes edited her account, Howe reveals the tension in the texts between telling a ’life’ and telling a ’lie’.
“With contributions by well-known and respected critics, writing of a very high caliber, and essays that explore hitherto uncharted territory, Mirrors and Echoes is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Spanish women's writing.”—Lou Charnon-Deutsch, author of Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women
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.