A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies (review)

In A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies, editors Xon de Ros and Geraldine Hazbun, lecturers in Spanish literature at the University of Oxford, have provided the reader with an array of critical essays having in common their focus on Spanish women’s studies, but from a diversity of time periods, aspects, and perspectives. The editors affirm in their introduction that the collection presents a “a good range of models for scholarship and a sound insight into the main issues and recent critical debates in the field of women’s studies, showing its possibilities within the Spanish context and opening up avenues for further research” (4). As have many other studies following up on Beth Miller’s call to attention with her pioneering book (Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, 1978), this one continues in the same direction but from a contemporary point of view, serving as a reference to and representation of important studies undertaken since, a “record of the present state of research” (22).

The anthology consists of a collection of twenty-one essays divided into two sections, with the first ten articles focusing on Spanish women writers from the medieval and early modern period and the remaining eleven covering writers from the eighteenth century up to the present day. Chronology provides overall unity to the collection, rather than an emphasis on any one specific approach or discipline. Individual essays in themselves offer a variety of critical foci, ranging from literary criticism, to historical and sociological analysis, to an interdisciplinary cultural lens. Many of the contributors are already well known in the field of Spanish women’s studies and offer new, distinctive approaches: Lou Charnon-Deutsch on women and visual culture in nineteenth-century Spain, Margaret Greer on María de Zayas and “Carnal Knowledge,” Louise Haywood on “Choosing and Testing Spouses” in medieval literature, Susan Kirkpatrick on “Women as Cultural Agents in Spanish Modernity,” Frances Lannon on “Gender and Change” during the Second Republic, Roberta Quance on women artists and the “Theatricalized Self” from 1920 forward, Alison Sinclair on “Containment and Excess” in the nineteenth century, and Joyce Tolliver on “Politics and the Feminist Essay,” for example.

The other authors included provide great promise as well in their innovative treatments: Andrew Beresford and Georgina Dopico-Black address the issues and problems of medieval and early modern female saints, the latter focusing on St. Teresa and the “unstable body,” Nieves Baranda discusses male discourse in medieval women authors, and Mariana Masera also takes on the question of language and female voice in early lyric poetry. Difference is again the prominent question in the articles by Rosanna Cantavella, whose thesis is vindicating women through the unique figure and activities of Isabel de Villena, and Alexander Samson, who brings a fresh perspective to the age-old question of whether Spanish Golden Age female dramatists can be considered distinct. The editors themselves cross chronological boundaries in their essays, as Hazbun discusses female roles in medieval epic poetry and de Ros brings the reader up to the present with her piece on reading contemporary women’s autobiography.

Going beyond limitations of word, space, and time, Mónica Bolufer examines eighteenth-century French and Spanish women writers working in translation and co-authors Helen Buffery and Laura Lonsdale focus on Catalan women writers and the “Contested Space of Home.” Also transcending a strict disciplinary focus, Carmen Fracchia considers women’s art and visual representation in the early period and Jessamy Harvey (“Spectacular Eroticism and the Spanish New Woman”) and Jo Evans (“Almodóvar’s ‘Others’: Spanish Women Film-Makers, Masquerade and Maternity”) evaluate contemporary representations of women in Spanish film. All essays include suggestions for further reading and bibliography. The collection concludes with a comprehensive and useful bibliography for the study of Spanish women’s studies over the past 35 years.

In their introduction, the editors provide a helpful summary and synthesis of the study of Spanish women’s writing dating from the publication of Miller...