Wow! eBook
Contemporary Spanish American Novels by Women
Author(s): Susan E. Carvalho (Author)
- Publisher: Tamesis Books
- Publication Date: 21 Jun. 2007
- Language: English
- Print length: 199 pages
- ISBN-10: 185566142X
- ISBN-13: 9781855661424
Book Description
Space is critical to imaginative writing. As English novelist Elizabeth Bowen has observed: ‘nothing can happen nowhere’. This book offers an interdisciplinary framework for reading novels, and in particular women’s fiction in Spanish America, with a focus on geoplot, on space rather than time as the narrative engine. Following the work of Lefebvre and Friedman, the author examines recent works by Spanish America’s most visible women novelists – Angeles Mastretta [Mexico], Isabel Allende [Chile], Rosario Ferré [Puerto Rico], Sara Sefchovich [Mexico] and Laura Restrepo [Colombia] -and the ways in which their female protagonists challenge the spatial barriers erected by capitalist hegemony. Margins, borders, liminal spaces, the chora-space, and the body are emphasized as potential sites of transgression. The analysis identifies spatial negotiation as a mechanism both for cementing and for undermining authority, thus exposing the strategies through which literature constructs and represents power. SUSAN CARVALHO is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky, and Director of the Middlebury College Spanish School.
Editorial Reviews
Review
A well written and illuminating study […] which will be of interest to many students and scholars in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies.
— BULLETIN OF HISPANIC STUDIES, 85, 2008
— BULLETIN OF HISPANIC STUDIES, 85, 2008
Carvalho’s interdisciplinary study on place and space in literary works
brings to the fore the importance of research across disciplines and offers an excellent theoretical approach for additional research in women’s literature.
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