Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain is a wide-ranging discussion on women's writing and representations of gender in Spanish literature and culture from the Romantic period to the fin de sicle. It is customary to regard gender roles and representation in nineteenth-century Spain as polarized and predictable. But in this volume, leading scholars from the UK and USA discuss not only patriarchal emphasis of Spanish culture, but also demonstrate that this was a period in which relations between men and women were being constantly negotiated, challenged, and redefined as part of an on-going transformation of political and national identities. Contributions look at women's writing and the representation of women in canonical texts, the construction of both femininity and masculinity, issues of race and region, and popular fiction, journalism, and the visual arts. All quotations are given in Spanish and in English translation. Lively, challenging, and theoretically sophisticated, Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain provides a much-needed overview of the Spanish cultural production in the most decisive of centuries.