Women Writers of Spain From the Enlightenment to the Contemporary Period

3 units

This course will examine various genres of writing by Spanish women--including narrative fiction, poetry, and the essay--from the eighteenth century to the contemporary period, paying attention to their role in engendering social and cultural transformations for women. We will approach their work, considering not only the challenges faced by women who took up the pen in different historical periods, but also the strategies they used to negotiate their participation in the public sphere as writers, intellectuals, social reformers and feminists. Authors to be studied include Enlightenment figures such as Josefa Amar y Borbón and María Rosa Gálvez; Romantic writers (Coronado, Gómez de Avellaneda), who, under the impact of liberalism, were key to shaping new models of subjectivity for women; nineteenth-century feminists and social reformers of the late nineteenth-century (Arenal, Pardo Bazán, Gimeno de Flaquer); early twentieth-century suffragists and freethinkers (Carmen de Burgos, Rosario de Acuña); and women writing during and in the aftermath of Franco's dictatorship (Rodoreda, Martín Gaite, Riera). We will explore the unique perspectives that these women bring to their writing as they address pressing social, political, and cultural issues-including universal suffrage, citizenship, slavery, nationalism, and women's (and human) rights.