This volume explores women's literary and cultural production in Latin America, and suggests how such works engage with discourses of identity, nationhood, and gender. Including contributions by several prominent Latin American scholars themselves, it seeks to provide a vital insight into the analysis and reception of the works in a local context, and foster debate between Latin American and metropolitan academics. The book is divided into two sections: Women and Nationhood, and Models and Genres. The first section comprises six chapters which examines women's responses to, and attempts to carve out space within, national discourses in a Latin American context. Spanning the nineteenth century to the present day, the chapters offer an insight into the ways in which Latin American women have constructed themselves as modern subjects of the nation, and made use of the ambiguous spaces created by modernization and national discourses. The section starts firstly with a focus on the Southern Cone, covering Chile and Argentina, and then moves geographically northward, to Colombia and Bolivia. The second section, Models and Genres, consists of six chapters that examine how women writers engage with, and critically re-work, existing literary discourses and paradigms. Considering phenomena such as detective fiction, fairy-tales, and classical mythological figures, the chapters illustrate how these genres and models-frequently coded as masculine-are given new inflections, both as a result of their deployment by women, and as a result of their re-working in a Latin American context.
About the Author: Claire Taylor is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool, and her research interests include Latin American women's writing, with a particular focus on the novels of Albalucia Angel, Carmen Boullosa, Laura Esquivel, Griselda Gambaro and Angelica Gorodischer. She is currently working on a three-year Leverhulme Grant for the project Gender and Women's Writing in Colombia, on which she is collaborating with researchers in the Universidad del Valle, Colombia. She is also leader on Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature, a collaborative project between Liverpool and the University of Leeds, and is currently working on a co-authored volume, due out in 2009, provisionally entitled Latin@s: The Discourses of Latin American Cyberculture. Recent publications include: Latin American Cyberliterature and Cyberculture, ed. with Thea Pitman (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), and Bodies and Texts: Configurations of Identity in the Works of Griselda Gambaro, Albalucia Angel and Laura Esquivel (Leeds: Maney for the MHRA, 2003).