"Juanita la Larga (1896) unfolds in a small town in nineteenth-century Spain and tells the story of a young girl's romance with a wealthy widower many years her senior. Appearing here for the first time in English, Valera's novel describes in detail life in an Andalusian hamlet."--BOOK JACKET.

Applying recent European and Anglo-American feminist scholarship to the problems of gender representation, Charnon-Deutsch challenges the prevailing idea that the 19th-century Spanish novel is woman centered. The author's examination of novels by Valera, Pereda, Alas, and Galdos demonstrates that these works are instead a complex exploration of male identity. Decoding the gender ideology of women's roles, discourse, and representations, Charnon-Deutsch uncovers in the novels multiple configurations of androcentricity as well as voyeuristic tendencies, which she interprets as a means of mastering what is threatening to the male psyche.

Juanita la Larga (1896), the third of Juan Valera's eponymous novels with a female protagonist, unfolds in a small town in nineteenth-century Spain and tells the story of a young girl's romance with a wealthy widower many years her senior.

"The story of Dan Fadrique Lopez de Mendoza, a man of seafaring adventures and a deist in the mould of the eighteenth-century philosophes, and Dona Blanca Roldan de Solis, a woman of unbounded pride and a Catholic driven by religious fanaticism, neither of which traits prevented her from having had an adulterous affair as a young woman in Lima, Peru, with Don Fadrique."--Back cover.

Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano (1824-1905), one of nineteenth-century Spain's most respected authors, lived an international life-a career in the diplomatic service, with postings to more than a half dozen countries in Europe and the Americas.