First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Women's Narrative and Film in 20th Century Spain examines the development of the feminine cultural tradition in spain and how this tradition reshaped and defined a Spanish national identity. Each chapter focuses on representation of autobiography, alienation and exile, marginality, race, eroticism, political activism, and feminism within the ever-changing nationalisms in different regions of Spain. The book describes how concepts of gender and difference shaped the individual, collective, and national identities of Spanish women and significantly modified the meaning and representation of female sexuality.

Using each chapter to juxtapose works by one female and one male Spanish writer, Gender and Modernity in Spanish Literature: 1789-1920 explores the concept of Spanish modernity. Issues explored include the changing roles of women, the male hysteric, and the mother and Don Juan figure.

“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

Cristina Fernandez Cubas is, without question, one of the most important of the Spanish writers who have begun to publish since the end of the Franco dictatorship. Credited with playing a major role in the renaissance of the short story in Spain, she has won national and international acclaim for her fiction. Works by her have been translated into eight languages and have become a staple of university courses on contemporary Peninsular literature. Fernandez Cubas has created a remarkably coherent narrative world, nourished by a core of fundamental concerns. The eleven essays of Mapping the Fiction of Cristina Fernandez Cubas examine the intellectual preoccupations, narrative strategies, and rhetorical devices that distinguish the four volumes of short stories, two novels, the play, and the book of memoirs that she has published to date.

Mar Soria presents an innovative cultural analysis of female workers in Spanish literature and films. Drawing from nation-building theories, the work of feminist geographers, and ideas about the construction of the marginal subject in society, Soria examines how working women were perceived as Other in Spain from 1880 to 1975. By studying the representation of these marginalized individuals in a diverse array of cultural artifacts, Soria contends that urban women workers symbolized the desires and anxieties of a nation caught between traditional values and rapidly shifting socioeconomic forces. Specifically, the representation of urban female work became a mode of reinforcing and contesting dominant discourses of gender, class, space, and nationhood in critical moments after 1880, when social and economic upheavals resulted in fears of impending national instability. Through these cultural artifacts Spaniards wrestled with the unresolved contradictions in the gender and class ideologies used to construct and maintain the national imaginary. ? Whether for reasons of inattention or disregard of issues surrounding class dynamics, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literary and cultural critics have assumed that working women played only a minimal role in the development of Spain as a modern nation. As a result, relatively few critics have investigated cultural narratives of female labor during this period. Soria demonstrates that without considering the role working women played in the construction and modernization of Spain, our understanding of Spanish culture and life at that time remains incomplete.

The authors studied, born between 1867 and l966, evince an interest in one or more of the issues that structure and give unity to this book: the construction of the self, concepts of gender and nation, center and margin, and efforts to recover and/or reconstruct the past, both individual and collective. In addition to focusing on questions that are currently of great critical interest, the volume features both Castilian and Catalan authors.

The Spanish novel in a turbulent century.

Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema is the first volume to delve into the construction of children's subjectivity and agency in Latin American film, and addresses such questions as: How and to what extent do films express the point of view of the child? How do plots and film practices represent children’s subjectivity and agency? Childhood studies has demonstrated the importance of examining the lives of children. Building on those insights, together with current research from film studies and Latin American cultural studies, the essays in this volume analyze the development of agency and voices of minors in contemporary Latin American film. The theoretical perspectives used—gender studies, psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, film studies, play and performance studies, and emotion studies, among others—take into account innovative approaches to filmic techniques as they explore the varied representations of children.