Spanish Literature Resources: Women in Latin American Literature

Women have always been the muses who inspire the creativity of men, but how do women become the creators of art themselves? This was the challenge faced by Latin American women who aspired to write in the 1920s and 1930s. In this innovative book, Vicky Unruh explores how women writers of the vanguard period often gained access to literary life as public performers. Using a novel, interdisciplinary synthesis of performance theory, she shows how Latin American women's work in theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, and bold journalistic self-portraiture helped them craft their public personas as writers and shaped their singular forms of analytical thought, cultural critique, and literary style. Concentrating on eleven writers from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, Unruh demonstrates that, as these women identified themselves as instigators of change rather than as passive muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social and artistic modernization in Latin America.

From a comparative perspective and within the frameworks of feminist criticism and of Bakhtin's approach to language, Maria Teresa Medeiros-Lichem traces the evolution of Latin American women writers' participation in discourse. In this study of the theoretical and the fictional aspects of women's writing, Medeiros-Lichem reviews the leading trends of the Latin American feminist literary debate and the emergence of a feminine voice through language strategies in the fiction of nine innovative authors from the 1920s through the 1990s. The works of Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela are presented within the context of their theoretical writings that construct a feminist aesthetics and reflect their artistic philosophy. This book shows how much of women's fiction has often provided a space for the revelation of the multiple layers of feminine experience and the inscription of unrecorded events from a social and political reality marked by fear and oppression.

This volume offers a critical study of a representative selection of Latin American women writers who have made major contributions to all literary genres and represent a wide range of literary perspectives and styles. Many of these women have attained the highest literary honours: Gabriela Mistral won the Nobel Prize in 1945; Clarice Lispector attracted the critical attention of theorists working mainly outside the Hispanic area; others have made such telling contributions to particular strands of literature that their names are immediately evocative of specific currents or styles.

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.