Noted scholars of Latin American and Spanish literature here explore the literary history of Latin America through the representation of iconic female characters. Focusing both on canonical novels and on works virtually unknown outside their original countries, the essays discuss the important ways in which these characters represent nature, history, race and sex, the effects of globalization, and the unknowable "other." They examine how both male and female writers portray Latin American women, reinterpreting the dynamics between the genders across boundaries and historical periods. Drawing on recent theories in literary criticism, gender, and Latin American studies, these essays illuminate the women characters as conduits for the appreciation of their countries and cultures.

The topics covered by this pioneering collection of essays range from peninsular Spanish to Latin American literature, from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, and from the subject of women as portrayed in Hispanic literature to the literature of Hispanic women writers. Some pieces present polemical feminist arguments, other are more traditional. All the contributors use their subject to take new stands on old controversies, ask new questions, and reevaluate important aspects of Hispanic literature. While there is ample evidence in these essays of the dual archetype in Hispanic literature of women as icon and woman as fallen idol, the collection reaches beyond these stereotypes to more complex sociological and theoretical concerns. Although such research has ben abundantly pursued by scholars of English and American literature, it has been notably absent from Hispanic studies. This anthology is a comprehensive introduction to its subject and a stimulus to further work in the area. Contributors: Fernando Alegría Electa Arenal Julianne Burton Alan Deyermond Rosalie Gimeno Harriet Goldberg Estelle Irizarry Kathleen Kish Luis Leal Linda Gould Levine Melveena McKendrick Francine Masiello Beth Miller Elizabeth Ordóñez Rachel Phillips Marcia L. Welles This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1983.

This groundbreaking study explores feminist theory and literary criticism embedded in seventeen works by Hispanic American authors and Latina writers in the United States. The books bring out women's philosophic and historic concepts of becoming a woman politically in the public sphere of society. Philosophers like Luce Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari have realized that woman's representation in philosophic discursions are missing. The universal "mankind" or the omnipresent "self" can no longer ignore that women have different experiences than man in both the private and public realm. Each aesthetic work whether novel, poem or short story brings a woman-centered concern written by a woman author. The first fourteen lie in diversity; historic, national, cultural and ethnic experiences that Hispanic women undergo daily or during times of social upheaval, mainly dictatorships. How they write imparts experience and action in her trials of becoming multiple selves or subjectivities which theorists and female critics alike identify is missing from two thousand years of Western Philosophy. The stories are unique as the introduction underlines the basis of the concept of becoming which women may embrace in writing themselves politically in literature. The last four works by U.S. Latinas is further problematized through the process of immigration. Hispanic women on their way to becoming Americans have many factors to consider: race, gender, ethnicity, education and social class, which applies to all the main woman characters in each selective work. The criterion is set in the Introduction and applied to work which inspired it. Written from a multicultural standpoint draws from an interdisciplinary perspective whether, psychology, economics, feminist theories, philosophy and history. The study intends to look at ways of thinking the woman question and how she defines herself in the process.

Presenting and interrogating an array of texts and discourses, this collection brings into focus a broad range of topics whose common denominator is the intersection between cultural productions and politics in different moments of the history of Latin America and Spain. From the struggles of class distinction, identity and community in 19th and 20th century and contemporary Latin America as explored in photography, literature and film, to how political and sexual transgressions from medieval times to the present are portrayed in Hispanic literature, and the ways that canonical and non-canonical texts in Spain have been defying hegemonic power relations in the 20th century and beyond. This volume provides fresh approaches from well-established scholars, as well as from a new generation of researchers whose works enlighten the reader about the rich facets of such intersections. This publication also offers a background to pursue further research in these areas and to serve the general public interested in Latin American and Spanish literary and cultural studies, and those seeking a greater understanding of social and economic change in both Latin America and Spain: specifically, issues of inclusion and citizenship; the constraints on state power in the neoliberal era; the strategies used by texts to create subjects that are not bound to conventional identity formations; and the challenges and possibilities of subverting the gaze of the institutional spectator.