Mothers without Fathers or Nothing More than a Woman: Gender and Anarchism in the Work of Federica Montseny, 1923–1929

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Atlantic Threads: Singer in Spain and Mexico, 1860-1940

Offering a fresh, revisionist analysis of Spanish fiction from 1900 to 1940, this study examines the work of both men and women writers and how they practiced differing forms of modernism. As Roberta Johnson notes, Spanish male novelists emphasized technical and verbal innovation in representing the contents of an individual consciousness and thus were more modernist in the usual understanding of the term. Female writers, on the other hand, were less aesthetically innovative but engaged in a social modernism that focused on domestic issues, gender roles, and relations between the sexes. Compared to the more conventional--even reactionary--ways their male counterparts treated such matters, Spanish women's fiction in the first half of the twentieth century was often revolutionary.The book begins by tracing the history of public discourse on gender from the 1890s through the 1930s, a discourse that included the rise of feminism. Each chapter then analyzes works by female and male novelists that address key issues related to gender and nationalism: the concept of intrahistoria, or an essential Spanish soul; modernist uses of figures from the Spanish literary tradition, notably Don Quixote and Don Juan; biological theories of gender prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s; and the growth of an organized feminist movement that coincided with the burgeoning Republican movement.This is the first book dealing with this period of Spanish literature to consider women novelists, such as Maria Martinez Sierra, Carmen de Burgos, and Concha Espina, alongside canonical male novelists, including Miguel de Unamuno, Ramon del Valle-Inclan, and Pio Baroja. With its contrasting conceptions of modernism, Johnson's work provides a compelling new model for bridging the gender divide in the study of Spanish fiction.

Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel

Women and social change

In this first book-length study of the role women played in two of the most momentous revolutions of the twentieth century, Tabea Alexa Linhard provides a comparative analysis of works on the Mexican Revolution (circa 1910-1919) and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Linhard was inspired by the story of the "Trece Rosas," thirteen young women who, after the Spanish Civil War ended with the Nationalists' victory, were executed. One of the women, Julia Conesa, was particularly influential. In a letter she wrote to her mother a few hours before she faced the firing squad, she said, "Do not allow my name to vanish in history." This is Linhard's attempt to respond to Julia's last request. Although female figures such as the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution and the milicianas of the Spanish Civil War are abundant in writings about revolution and war, they are often treated as icons, myths, and symbols, displacing the women's particular and diverse experiences. Linhard maintains a focus on these women's stories, which until now - when presented at all - have usually been downplayed in literary canons, official histories, and popular memories. She addresses several existing gaps in studies of the intersections of gender, revolution, and culture in both the Mexican and the Spanish contexts. The book is grounded in transatlantic studies, an emerging field that bridges disciplinary boundaries between peninsular studies and Latin American studies. In this case, the connection between the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War is a natural consequence of the disjointed conditions out of which arose the cultural texts in which fearless women appear.

Fearless women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

The marriage of philosophy and fiction in the first third of Spain's twentieth century was a fertile one. It produced some truly notable offspring - novels that cross genre boundaries to find innovative forms, and treatises that fuse literature and philosophy in new ways. In her illuminating interdisciplinary study of Spanish fiction of the "Silver Age, " Roberta Johnson places this important body of Spanish literature in context through a synthesis of social, literary, and philosophical history. Her examination of the work of Miguel de Unamuno, Pio Baroja, Azorin, Ramon Perez de Ayala, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Gabriel Miro, Pedro Salinas, Rosa Chacel, and Benjamin Jarnes brings to light philosophical frictions and debates and opens new interpersonal and intertextual perspectives on many of the period's most canonical novels. Johnson reformulates the traditional discussion of generations and "isms" by viewing the period as an intergenerational complex in which writers with similar philosophical and personal interests constituted dynamic groupings that interacted and constantly defined and redefined one another. Current narratological theories, including those of Todorov, Genette, Bakhtin, and Martinez Bonati, assist in teasing out the intertextual maneuvers and philosophical conflicts embedded in the novels of the period, while the sociological and biographical material bridges the philosophical and literary analyses. The result, solidly grounded in original archival research, is a convincingly complete picture of Spain's intellectual world in the first thirty years of this century. Crossfire should revolutionize thinking about the Generation of '98 and the Generation of '14 by identifyingthe heterogeneous philosophical sources of each and the writers' reactions to them in fiction.

Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain, 1900-1934

In her five long novels, Carmen Laforet consistently attempted to find new narrative means of framing a feminist message. There exist studies of her use of the Bildungsroman, the Gothic, and Expressionism in Nada. This essay focuses on elements of detective fiction, especially the noir subgenre, in Laforet’s novelistic production, concentrating on Al volver la esquina published posthumously in 2004. The masculine protagonistnarrator moves in a world that is akin to those of North American noir films and novels in order to reveal his dilemma as a man of traditional Spanish masculinist values in a Spain that is beginning to experience the influence of other countries where gender roles are changing.

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La novelística feminista de Carmen Laforet y el género negro

Maria Zambrano's work contradicts the common notion that there is a dearth of philosophy and literary theory in Spain. She argued that Spanish conceptual thinking is embedded in literature in the form of a razin poetica, a concept that, unlike traditional philosophical reason, includes the emotions. Zambrano's philosophical approach to literature focuses on the nature of the self in society in such books as Filosofia y poesia, Pensamiento y poesia en la vida espafiola, and La confesiin como genero literario. The ideas developed in these books, when applied to analyses of specific texts, such as Don Quixote and several of Gald6s's novels, reveal knowledge and selfhood as contingent upon gender and nation. Zambrano's essays on particular texts focus on female characters who best represent "poetic reason" and Spain's sense of nationhood. Benigna of Misericordia is the novelistic character she finds most suited to her theories of literature as the locus of Spanish poetic reason.

Roberta Johnson

Papers

Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel

Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain, 1900-1934

La novelística feminista de Carmen Laforet y el género negro

Maria Zambrano's Theory of Literature as Knowledge and Contingency

El ser y la palabra en Gabriel Miró