Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change

Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder

Jennifer Smith (Ed.)

2018
248 pages
$37.95
ISBN 9781684480326

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder's invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. The contributors study women as agents and representations of social change in a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, plays, personal letters, and journalistic pieces. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas "Clarín," and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.

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Reviews

"[A]n essential volume for specialists and non-specialists alike, as all eleven chapters offer insightful and innovative readings of important works from Spain's nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Agents of Change stands as a fitting tribute to the work and academic life of this prodigious Hispanist [Bieder] by making significant contributions to the continued dialogues on many of the same authors and critical approaches that we find in Bieder's body of work."
- Anales Galdosianos, December 2021

"An outstanding contribution of cutting-edge research to students and scholars of feminist discourses, gender studies, and modern Peninsular literatures and cultures."
-Hispania

"The volume demonstrates the need to continue learning about the historical and cultural legacy of these women as agents of change and modernity to understand in more detail the role of Spanish women in the present moment, a moment that is challenging the anti-feminist and conservative discourse on both sides of the Atlantic as outdated."
- In Revista de Literatura, 2020

"This book is a beautiful tribute to Maryellen Bieder, an important and significant scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish narrative by women. The essays in this book - by scholars and writers of several different generations who are also highly esteemed in the same and other areas - expand and continue Bieder's research to new horizons."
- Sandra J. Schumm, author of Mother and Myth in Spanish Novels

"An outstanding work of collaborative scholarship and unreservedly recommended for community Women's Studies sections, as well as college, and university library collections Literary & Iberian Studies collections."
- Midwest Book Review

"This meticulous compilation by Jennifer Smith pays a well-deserved tribute to Maryellen Bieder on the occasion of her death in January 2018 ... [It] offers a rich variety of critical approaches that reveal the obstacles that Spanish women had to overcome when creating their own space after the fall of the Old Regime."
- Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2020

"The volume adds to our understanding of nineteenth-century women's agency and the lead roles played by women in conversations about modernity and national identity within the cultural, literary and political spheres. The volume also models the same kind of literary activism championed by some of the women whose work inspires its various chapters. . . . [A]n especially helpful resource for scholars teaching women writers and feminist approaches to reading nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spanish Peninsular literature and culture."
- Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, May 2021

About the editor:

Jennifer Smith is an associate professor of Spanish and interim chair of the department of languages, cultures, and international trade at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She is the coeditor of Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish Literature and Culture.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $150, 978-1-6844-8033-3; EPUB: $37.95, 978-1-6844-8034-0