The Maravillas District

Rosa Chacel belongs to that brilliant generation of artists that moved to the cultural vanguard in the 1920s and 1930s: García Lorca, Buñuel, Dali, Alberti, Guillén, Aleixandre. As a young artist—a sculptor and writer—she participated in the intellectual ferment of Madrid during those decades. But the victory of fascism in the late thirties erased Chacel's works and the works of other women from the cultural memory until recently. In the interim Chacel was exiled in Brazil and Argentina. At last her work has returned to light. So has Chacel herself. The Maravillas District (Barrio de maravillas, 1976) is the first novel in an autobiographical trilogy and the finest of Chacel's works to date. Proustian in its use of memory (yet unique in style), it traces two girls' discovery of their artistic and intellectual vocations, focusing less on the social and cultural obstacles to women's self-realization--though these are present—than on the invicible impulses of imagination and intellect in these girls' lives and on the enabling power of their mutual support. In its English translation it will rank alongside Virginia Woolf's and Sylvia Plath's autobiographical works depicting the woman artist's experience.

Traces the tradition of Spanish women's writing from the end of the Romantic period until the present day. Professor Davies places the major authors within the changing political, cultural and economic context of women's lives over the past century-and-a-half -- with particular attention to women's accounts of female subjectivity in relation to the Spanish nation-state, government politics, and the women's liberation movement.

A masterpiece of modernist fiction about one man’s search for meaning, Dream of Reason (La sinrazón) reveals Rosa Chacel as an intellectual and literary innovator whose work stands alongside that of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf. This meditative novel, grounded in the thinking of Spain’s great modern philosopher Ortega y Gasset, unfolds as the journal of a bourgeois chemist who makes his way in Buenos Aires just before and during the Spanish Civil War. Tracing his relationship with three women, Santiago Hernández explores the power of his own intentions and the limits of human reason. His introspective experiment, set against the background of world-altering events, documents the workings of a self-absorbed mind speculating on the inseparability of self and circumstance and is a brilliant enactment of how, from such tensions, narrative emerges.

The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel presents the development of the modern Spanish novel from 1600 to the present. Drawing on the combined legacies of Don Quijote and the traditions of the picaresque novel, these essays focus on the question of invention and experiment, on what constitutes the singular features of evolving fictional forms. It examines how the novel articulates the relationships between history and fiction, high and popular culture, art and ideology, and gender and society. Contributors highlight the role played by historical events and cultural contexts in the elaboration of the Spanish novel, which often takes a self-conscious stance toward literary tradition. Topics covered include the regional novel, women writers, and film and literature. This companionable survey, which includes a chronology and guide to further reading, conveys a vivid sense of the innovative techniques of the Spanish novel and of the debates surrounding it.

Issues around national identities have been central in Hispanism in recent years. However, scholarship remains pending on women's contributions to Spanish national agendas. This book addresses the visions of history, culture, and national identity articulated by Rosario de Acuna (1851-1923), angela Figuera (1902-1984), and Rosa Chacel (1898-1994). Their works elucidate the contested formation of Spanish democracy and the gendered politics of culture. Types of liberalism in late nineteenth-century Spain are debated in Acuna's theater and essays in part 1. Figuera's poetry, the focus of part 2, highlights the notion of history as trauma resulting from the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship, to privilege the recovery of historical memory. Part 3 explores Chacel's re-invention, in Barrio de Maravillas and Acropolis, of the liberal cultures of early twentieth-century Spain, from within a post-Franco era eager to reclaim those histories. The conclusion addresses the relevance of the writers' projects for present-day Spain. Christine Arkinstall is Associate Professor in Spanish at The University of Auckland.

This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies

The Encyclopedia of the Novel is the first reference book that focuses on the development of the novel throughout the world. Entries on individual writers assess the place of that writer within the development of the novel form, explaining why and in exactly what ways that writer is importnant. Similarly, an entry on an individual novel discusses the importance of that novel not only form, analyzing the particular innovations that novel has introduced and the ways in which it has influenced the subsequent course of the genre. A wide range of topic entries explore the history, criticism, theory, production, dissemination and reception of the novel. A very important component of the Encyclopedia of the Novel is its long surveys of development of the novel in various regions of the world.