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.

From East L.A. to the barrios of New York City and the Cuban neighborhoods of Miami, Latino literature, or literature written by Hispanic peoples of the United States, is the written word of North America's vibrant Latino communities. Emerging from the fusion of Spanish, North American, and African cultures, it has always been part of the American mosaic. Written for students and general readers, this encyclopedia surveys the vast landscape of Latino literature from the colonial era to the present. Aiming to be as broad and inclusive as possible, the encyclopedia covers all of native North American Latino literature as well as that created by authors originating in virtually every country of Spanish America and Spain. Included are more than 700 alphabetically arranged entries written by roughly 60 expert contributors. While most of the entries are on writers, such as Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Oscar Hijuelos, and Piri Thomas, others cover genres, ethnic and national literatures, movements, historical topics and events, themes, concepts, associations and organizations, and publishers and magazines. Special attention is given to the cultural, political, social, and historical contexts in which Latino literature has developed. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. The encyclopedia gives special attention to the social, cultural, historical, and political contexts of Latino literature, thus making it an ideal tool to help students use literature to learn about history and cultural diversity.

Providing a detailed historical overview of Hispanic literature in the United States from the Spanish colonial period to the present, this extensive chronology provides the context within which such writers as Sandra Cisneros, Rodolfo Anaya, and Oscar Hijuelos have worked. Hispanic literature in the United States is covered from the Spanish colonial period to the present. A detailed historical overview and a separate survey of Hispanic drama provide researchers and general readers with indispensable information and insight into Hispanic literature. An extensive chronology traces the development of Hispanic literature and culture in the United States from 1492 to 2002, providing the context within which such Hispanic writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Rodolfo Anaya, and Oscar Hijuelos have worked. Topics include an overview and chronology of Hispanic literature in the United States, a who's who of Hispanic authors, significant trends, movements, and themes, publishing trends, an overview of Hispanic drama, adn the 100 essential Hispanic literary works. Biographical entries describe the careers, importance, and major works of notable Hispanic novelists, poets, and playwrights writing in English or Spanish. A comprehensive, up-to-date bibliography lists primary sources. Essays detail the most important past and current trends in Hispanic literature, including bilingualism, Chicano literature, children's literature, exile literature, folklore, immigrant literature, Nuyorican literature, poetry, and women and feminism in Hispanic literature. More than 100 exceptional illustrations of writers, plays in performance, and first editions of important works are included.

Presents a collection of critical essays analyzing modern Hispanic American writers including Junot Diaz, Pat Mora, and Rudolfo Anaya.

The antithesis of the madre abnegada is the mujer mala, the whore, a notion the author also questions by revealing the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship, through which women may perpetuate their own oppression."--Jacket.

This volume of essays is the ninth in the series produced under the auspices of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project at the University of Houston. This ongoing and comprehensive program seeks to locate, identify, preserve and disseminate the literary contributions of U.S. Latinos from the Spanish Colonial Period to contemporary times. The twelve essays included in this volume examine key topics relevant to the exploration of Hispanic literary production in the United States, including memory, testimony, femininity and identity. Originally presented at the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project’s biennial conferences in 2010 and 2012, the essays are divided into four sections: “Recovering Historical Memory: Exploration, Social Space and Lands of Contention,” “Culture and Ideology: Transnational Communities, Language and Geopolitical Borders,” “Autobiography, Testimonio and Expressions of Resistance,” and “Feminism, Culture and Identities in Conflict.”

Mexican Literature as World Literature is a landmark collection that, for the first time, studies the major interventions of Mexican literature of all genres in world literary circuits from the 16th century forward. This collection features a range of essays in dialogue with major theorists and critics of the concept of world literature. Authors show how the arrival of Spanish conquerors and priests, the work of enlightenment naturalists, the rise of Mexican academies, the culture of the Mexican Revolution, and Mexican neoliberalism have played major roles in the formation of world literary structures. The book features major scholars in Mexican literary studies engaging in the ways in which modernism, counterculture, and extinction have been essential to Mexico's world literary pursuit, as well as studies of the work of some of Mexico's most important authors: Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and Juan Rulfo, among others. These essays expand and enrich the understanding of Mexican literature as world literature, showing the many significant ways in which Mexico has been a center for world literary circuits.

The first major study on the works of the Mexican novelist, Angeles Mastretta, demonstrating the rich complexity and range of the author's fiction and essays. The Mexican novelist, Angeles Mastretta [b. 1949], has only recently received serious critical attention largely because her work has been seen as 'popular' and therefore inappropriate for academic study. This first major work tobe published on Mastretta seeks to demonstrate the rich complexity and range of the author's fiction and essays. In the tradition of Post-Boom Latin American women's writing, Mastretta's texts are motivated by a desire to speak primarily of the silenced experiences and voices of women. Two of her novels, referential and testimonial in style, can be placed within the Mexican Revolutionary Novel tradition and explore the Revolutionary period and its consequences in the light of female experiences and perspectives. The hitherto unexplored themes of female sexuality and bodily erotics in Mastretta's texts are also considered in this volume. Her feminist works avoid facile simplifications: heterogeneous and dialogical, they interweave the historical and the fictional, the everyday and the fantastic. The originality of Mastretta's writing lies in its elusive postmodern ambiguities: shimmering surfacesare often interrupted by unexpected depths and proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis. Jane Elizabeth Lavery lectures in Latin American Studies at the University of Kent.