Voces Femeninas de Hispanoamerica presents in one volume a selection of the most representative and outstanding writing by Latin American women writers from the seventeenth century to the present. Designed as a text for third and fourth-year students, the selections, writers' biographies, historical introduction, and appendixes are entirely in Spanish, with notes to help students with difficult words or passages.

"Study of the role women played in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Examines female figures such as the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution and the milicianas of the Spanish Civil War and the intersection of gender, revolution, and culture in both the Mexican and the Spanish contexts"--Provided by publisher.

Writing Teresa: The Saint from Ávila at the fin-de-siglo examines the Teresa de Jesús “boom” of roughly 1880–1930, and offers an in-depth study of five major Spanish participants in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century explosion of literary treatments of St. Teresa. This historical period’s interest in the Saint from Ávila relates to popularization and nationalization of aspects of Catholicism, technological advances, a modernist fascination with saintly heroes, the search for new Spanish identities, and the evolving role of women writers and intellectuals. Teresa was mysticism in its historical context, energy in a time of doubt, the possibility of reconciling science and spirituality, a new vision for writing, and a maternal figure linked to the religion of the past for those who had lost the faith of their childhood.

This book explores the complexity of Iberian identity and multicultural/multi-religious interactions in the Peninsula through the lens of spells, talismans, and imaginative fiction in medieval and early modern Iberia. Focusing particularly on love magic—which manipulates objects, celestial spheres, and demonic conjurings to facilitate sexual encounters—Menaldi examines how practitioners and victims of such magic as represented in major works produced in Castile. Magic, and love magic in particular, is an exchange of knowledge, a claim to power and a deviation from or subversion of the licit practices permitted by authoritative decrees. As such, magic serves as a metaphorical tool for understanding the complex relationships of the Christian with the non-Christian. In seeking to understand and incorporate hidden secrets that presumably reveal how one can manipulate their environment, occult knowledge became one of the funnels through which cultures and practices mixed and adapted throughout the centuries.

The codes of conduct imposed on females by Spain's dictator Francisco Franco after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) created a stifling environment for women until his death in 1975. Beginning with Carmen Laforet's 1944 Nadal Prize-winning novel Nada, novels by women - many of which explore female identity - began to proliferate in Spain. The works examined in this study - Nada, Primera memoria (1960) by Ana Maria Matute, La placa del Diamant (1962) by Merce Rodoreda, Julia (1969) by Ana Maria Moix, El cuarto de atras (1978) by Carmen Martin Gaite, El amor es un juego solitario (1979) by Esther Tusquets, and Questio d'amor propi (1987) by Carme Riera - feature female protagonists struggling for self-realization and, by extension, for change in a restrictive Spanish society. Schumm's analysis of the seven novels demonstrates how examination of metaphoric tropes and mirror images provides insight into the protagonists' development.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) pitted conservative forces including the army, the Church, the Falange (fascist party), landowners, and industrial capitalists against the Republic, installed in 1931 and supported by intellectuals, the petite bourgeoisie, many campesinos (farm laborers), and the urban proletariat. Provoking heated passions on both sides, the Civil War soon became an international phenomenon that inspired a number of literary works reflecting the impact of the war on foreign and national writers. While the literature of the period has been the subject of scholarship, women's literary production has not been studied as a body of work in the same way that literature by men has been, and its unique features have not been examined. Addressing this lacuna in literary studies, this volume provides fresh perspectives on well-known women writers, as well as less studied ones, whose works take the Spanish Civil War as a theme. The authors represented in this collection reflect a wide range of political positions. Writers such as Maria Zambrano, Mercè Rodoreda, and Josefina Aldecoa were clearly aligned with the Republic, whereas others, including Mercedes Salisachs and Liberata Masoliver, sympathized with the Nationalists. Most, however, are situated in a more ambiguous political space, although the ethics and character portraits that emerge in their works might suggest Republican sympathies. Taken together, the essays are an important contribution to scholarship on literature inspired by this pivotal point in Spanish history.