This volume gives access to debates in Spanish women's studies.

This book, the first anthology in English, links the concerns of Spanish women's history to those of women's history elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world. The contributors, representing the best of the new historical scholarship, expand our knowledge of the general field of Spanish history and contribute to the reconfiguring of European history through the inclusion of the Spanish experience. They tie empirical inquiries into the history of women in Spain to current feminist theoretical concerns, including debates about identity and agency, and they show how "contesting identities" also lead to "contesting categories" and into broad debates about cultural particularism.

As in other countries, the effects of commercialization in Spain are changing the direction of publishing. Arguing that women face a particularly complex situation because the inclusion of their work is still considered a novelty in a male-dominated field, Christine Henseler examines the strategies of Spanish women authors in the face of market forces. In a consumer economy that places books in supermarkets and mega-bookstores and in which novels are promoted and read more for entertainment than for their literary merit, women's books tend to be more highly regarded when they cater to feminist, erotic, or commercial niche markets. Henseler examines the visual creation of the seductive female body inside and outside the texts and the verbal application of this female figure on a narrative level in the works of authors including Paloma Díaz-Mas, Lourdes Ortiz, Cristina Peri Rossi, Esther Tusquets, Almudena Grandes, and Lucía Etxebarría. She looks at novels of seduction, award-winning novels, and novels sold on the basis of an author's prior reputation, as well as advertisements, literary prizes, and reviews. She also draws on interviews with authors to provide insider views of contemporary Spanish publishing. Contemporary Spanish Women's Narrative and the Publishing Industry reveals the ways women writers are reacting -- both textually and promotionally--to the changing demands of the publishing industry and the construction of a literary canon.

This volume presents an overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of women's studies, including original essays by pioneering scholars as well as by younger specialists. New pathfinding models of theoretical analysis are balanced with a careful revisiting of the historical foundations of women's studies.

The history of women in early modern Spain is a largely untapped field. This book opens the field substantially by examining the position of women in religious, political, literary, and economic life. Drawing on both historical and literary approaches, the contributors challenge the portrait of Spanish women as passive and marginalized, showing that despite forces working to exclude them, women in Golden Age Spain influenced religious life and politics and made vital contributions to economic and cultural life. The contributors seek to incorporate the study of Spanish women into the current work on literary criticism and on the intersection of private and public spheres. The authors integrate women into subfields of Spanish history and literature, such as Inquisition studies, the Spanish monarchy, Spain's economic and political decline, and Golden Age drama. The essays demonstrate the necessity and value of incorporating women into the study of Golden Age Spain.

This is the only comparative study of its kind, investigating how women construct their roles within the public sphere and highlighting the ways in which traditional versus modern values impact on female identity in France and Spain. Which female figures are proposed for our admiration? Who proposes them and what values do they represent? This study embarks on an analysis of such cultural icons, going on to address contemporary roles and issues concerning women in the two countries. Finally, Twomey shows how these two strands of discussion inform and interact with each other. The 20th Century.