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This collection of essays confirms Carmen de Burgos’s pivotal place in Spanish feminist history by bringing together eminent international scholars who offer new readings of Burgos’s work. It includes the analyses of a number of lesser-known texts, both fictional and non-fictional, which give us a more comprehensive examination of Burgos’s multipronge feminist approach. Burgos’s works, especially her essays, are essential feminist reading and complement other European and North American traditions. Gaining familiarity with the breadth and depth of her work serves not only to provide an understanding of Spanish firstwave feminism, but also enriches our appreciation of cultural studies, gender studies, subaltern studies and travel literature. Looking at the entirety of her life and work, and the wide-ranging contributions in this volume, it is evident that Burgos embodied the tensions between tradition and modernity, depicting multiple representations of womanhood. Encouraging women to take ownership of their personal fashion, the design of their homes and the decorum of their families were steps towards recognizing a female population that was cognizant of its own desires.
Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (Alcañiz, 1850-Buenos Aires, 1919) was a Spanish journalist, newspaper editor, and author, who dedicated her life to the world of letters. She was also an intrepid international traveler at a time when it was not easy to cross the Atlantic. As a transatlantic author, she wrote novels, short stories, essays, opinion pieces, social commentary, and theater reviews. This book explores how Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer’s evolution as a writer was closely linked to the development of her political-literary project, in which a feminist activist agenda plays an important role. This critical edition contributes to existing research on Gimeno de Flaquer by examining a ...
This book explores women’s editorial and salon activities in Southern Europe and provides a comparative view of their practices. It argues that women in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece used their double role as editors and salonnières to engage with foreign cultures, launch the careers of promising young authors and advocate for modernization and social change. By examining a neglected body of periodicals edited between 1860 and 1920, this book sets out to explore women’s editorial agendas and their interest in creating a connection between salon life and the print press. What purpose did this connection serve? How did women editors use their periodicals and their salons to create opp...
This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and honors Maryellen Bieder's invaluable scholarly contributions. 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.
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 character...
Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals renders a vivid portrait of the intergenerational and intersectional dialogue between influential feminist writers on how to say no to the conditions of oppression, exclusion, and exploitation imposed by patriarchal and systemically racist capitalist societies. The book provides today’s readers and writers access to the powerful inventory of concepts and techniques that two generations of feminists have assembled for refusing domination and constituting fugitive forms of sociability and writing. Drawing on examples from feminist thinkers, Audre Lorde, Carla Lonzi, Hélène Cixous, Hortense Spillers, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anne Boyer and Simone White, the book focuses on how the power dynamics of recognition tie the uses of language to the material conditions of discrimination in everyday life.
This book seeks to unfold the complexity within the works of Dambudzo Marechera and presents scholars and readers with a way of reading his works in light of utopian thinking. Writing during a traumatic transitional period in Zimbabwe’s history, Marechera witnessed the upheavals caused by different parties battling for power in the nation. Aware of the fact that all institutionalized narratives – whether they originated from the colonial governance of the UK, Ian Smith’s white minority regime, or Zimbabwe’s revolutionary parties – appeal to visions of a utopian society but reveal themselves to be fiction, Marechera imagined a unique utopia. For Marechera, utopia is not a static ent...
Aldous Huxley is one of the most well-known modernist intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, excelling in novels, essays, philosophical tracts, and poems. His novels are special in that they use a unique form – the novel of ideas – with which to satirize human nature and the pride regarding human achievement. Few readers of English literature are not acquainted with books like Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaza, and Brave New World (novels dealt with in detail). A proper study of Huxley’s characterization in his novels opens up a veritable treasure-house of history, philosophy, psychology, and incisive satire. "Characterology", as the art of projecting different kinds of characters is called, is an ancient art, which either aimed at representing the entire universe in a single individual, or the same in a variegated form through various individuals. Huxley uses the latter kind in his representation of character, and as such, a study of the characters of his novels opens up a general interpretation of the universe as a whole.
Exploring Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Four Spanish Plays explores society’s influence on identity in Spanish theatrical works and discusses parallels to these works in contemporary popular culture. The Spanish plays El retablo de las maravillas (The Marvelous Puppet Show) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1615); Virtudes vencen señales (Virtues Overcome Signs) by Vélez de Guevara (1620); El público (The Audience) by Federico García Lorca (1929); and La llamada de Lauren (Lauren’s Call) by Paloma Pedrero (1985) all deal with characters in the midst of a crisis of identity. Using an eclectic approach, supported by contemporary theories of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Beth Bernstein analyzes the four plays in terms of identity and shows how society imposes the construction of identity. As the characters reach to define themselves, internal and external pressures guide them in interpreting acceptable behavior. This book offers a close reading of the psychological struggle of the characters, driven by society to cover their differences with a symbolic mask which, if donned, will eventually devour their true identity.