Cigar Smoke and Violet Water

Gendered Discourse in the Stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán

Joyce Tolliver

1998
219 pages
ISBN 9780838753750

This study offers a critical consideration of six stories that are representative of the gendered narrative dynamics found in Pardo Bazan's short fiction, as well as of the contestatory impulses more evident in the stories than in the novels. The cultural and discursive context within which Pardo Bazan inserted herself as public figure and writer provides a frame for the critical discussion. In particular, the focus is on two central aspects of this discursive context: the important part that gender played in Pardo Bazan's published polemics with her male literary colleagues; and the reactionary response to the European feminist movements that filled the pages of the same mainstream journals where Pardo Bazan published the majority of her short fiction.

About the author:

Joyce Tolliver teaches modern Spanish literature at the University of Illinois-Urbana.