Galician literature has historically played an integral role in the consolidation of Galician identity. Yet female novelists writing in Galician have only managed to achieve visibility in the Galician cultural sphere as recently as the turn of the twenty-first century; their contemporaries who opt to write in Spanish, moreover, are generally overlooked. This foundational study of contemporary narrative by Galician women in both languages examines the work of writers with disparate and often conflicting political and linguistic ideologies: Teresa Moure (b. 1969), Luisa Castro (b. 1966) and Marta Rivera de la Cruz (b. 1970). Catherine Barbour argues that the diverse manifestations of Galician identity in their novels, which defy institutional parameters in terms of language, politics and gender, suggest the need for a more porous understanding of Galician literature and identity that reflects the plurality of the Galician experience. Catherine Barbour is Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Surrey.

This book focuses on the emergence of women poets from the 1980s to the present in both Ireland and Galicia. Departing from common ground in shared myths and comparable political and social circumstances, each contributor to this volume looks into central aspects of Irish and Galician identity issues, which range from configurations of the nation, nature and feminine paradigms, to the poets' elaborations on their own literary practice. The comparative approach followed shows both that questions raised in one community can find relevant answers in the other and that reciprocal knowledge helps to disseminate the writers' work - and the criticism of it - beyond their respective national borders. This collection of essays and interviews also provides both poets and critics with a mutual space in which to voice their concerns, thus bringing down the barrier that is often raised artificially between these two literary activities.

This collection of short stories by 12 contemporary Galician writers serves as a small window into the Galician literary landscape. This eclectic anthology presents a variety of texts that gives a glimpse of the vitality of Galician literature in the last decades.

The book Us & Them: Women Writers’ Discourses on Foreignness analyses the contingent nature of the constructions of foreignness in Ireland and Galicia. On the basis of various comparable circumstances in both communities —migration flows, increasingly multicultural societies, constant renegotiations of national identity, and the growing visibility of women in the public sphere— this book traces the multiple ways in which gender is intertwined with foreignness. Focusing on literary works published since the 1980s the author presents contemporary women writers’ new insights into cultural difference.

This collection of critical essays addresses literary discourses on the mobility of women writers in various Atlantic regions of Europe. These literary systems (Ireland, Galicia, and Wales) experienced a rebirth in the second half of the twentieth century through their respective modern cultural artefacts, and the first decades of the present century have seen new research exploring emergent literatures in Europe, new European identities on the move, and even the dialogue between the various cultures of the Atlantic archipelago. This book centres on women writers and how they deal in their work with the issue of mobility. Authors and critics have tended to analyse travel by focusing on the transgression of patriarchal models of Western societies by white, middle-class women, these previously being mainly restricted to the private sphere, as well as on postcolonial issues with ethno- and Euro-centric slants. Notions of the construction of otherness are at stake here, in that even white women may be considered as belonging to a different ethnic group when they are migrants, thus showing how vulnerable and dependent women can be when isolated in a different environment. The narrative of history as progress may also be challenged in the twenty-first century by visions of nomadic women at risk of being displaced, both in their homeland and abroad.

Unique in its breadth of coverage, Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing is a comprehensive, authoritative and enjoyable guide to women's fiction, prose, poetry and drama from around the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Over the course of 1000 entries by over 150 international contributors, a picture emerges of the incredible range of women's writing in our time, from Toni Morrison to Fleur Adcock- all are here. This book includes the established and well-loved but also opens up new worlds of modern literature which may be unfamiliar but are never less than fascinating.

Galicia, a non-state nation in north-west Spain, has often been portrayed as a sentimental nation, a misty land of poets and legends. This book offers the first study of this trope as a feminizing, colonial stereotype that has marked Galician cultural history since the late nineteenth century. Through a close reading of the main texts of Galician literary history, the author shows how this trope has helped sustain the unequal power relation between Galicia and the Spanish State. As a consequence, questions of masculinity, morality and respectability have played an essential role in Galicia's national construction, thereby enforcing a masculine definition and limiting the role of women. This book argues for a revision of the main texts of Galician cultural nationalism through a gender and postcolonial perspective, showing that contemporary portrayals of Galician history are dependent on the politically debilitating trope of Galician sentimentality.