Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press


Book Description

How was the female body perceived in the popular culture of late nineteenth-century Spain? Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Lou Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture. Charnon-Deutsch organizes the 190 images reproduced in this book into six broad categories, or &"fictions of the feminine&": she reads women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a focalized point of male fear and desire, and as an eroticized expression of Spanish exoticism and political ambitions. These imaginary visions of femininity, Charnon-Deutsch argues, were a response to, and also helped to create, gendered stereotypes by suggesting ideal feminine behavior and poses. Further, they comprised a reassuring &"between-male&" cultural medium that provided graphic validation of women's docile body for a culture enthralled with femininity. Integrating the fields of literature and cultural studies, Charnon-Deutsch's approach to this subject is unique. Many of the images collected here are available for the first time, and they represent only a fraction of the two thousand images Charnon-Deutsch collected during her research. This book will appeal to students of Spanish cultural studies and gender studies, as well as to art historians.




A Companion to Spanish Women's Studies


Book Description

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.




Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789–1914


Book Description

Focusing on images of or produced by nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-à-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By considering works in a range of media by an array of canonical and understudied women artists, they demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting.




"Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789?914 "


Book Description

Focusing on images of or produced by well-to-do nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-?is the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By contrast, the essays collected in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting. In examining the relationship between affluent women, femininity and the public, the essays gathered here consider works by an array of artists that includes canonical ones such as Mary Cassatt and Fran?s G?rd as well as understudied women artists including Louise Abb? and Broncia Koller. The essays also consider works in a range of media from fashion prints and paintings to private journals and architectural designs, facilitating an analysis of femininity in public across the cultural production of the period. Various European centers, including Madrid, Florence, Paris, Brittany, Berlin and London, emerge as crucial sites of production for genteel femininity, providing a long-overdue rethinking of modern femininity in the public sphere.




Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change


Book Description

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and honors Maryellen Bieder's invaluable scholarly contributions. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.




Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle Spain


Book Description

Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle Spain argues that the reinterpretation of female mysticism as hysteria and nymphomania in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain was part of a larger project to suppress the growing female emancipation movement by sexualizing the female subject. This archival-historical work highlights the phenomenon in medical, social, and literary texts of the time, illustrating that despite many liberals' hostility toward the Church, secular doctors and intellectuals employed strikingly similar paradigms to those through which the early modern Spanish Church castigated female mysticism as demonic possession. Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism's subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. Pardo Bazán, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism as a path for women's personal development and self-realization.







Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era


Book Description

This innovative volume offers fresh perspectives and directions on the intersection of Hispanic and Jewish studies. It shows how 'Jewishness' has played a crucial role in Spanish political, social, and cultural developments in the modern era, exploring the effects of the multiple material and symbolic absences of Jews and Judaism from modern Spanish society. The book considers the haunting presence that this absence has entailed. Contributors analyze the different and contradictory ways in which Spain as a nation has tried to come to terms with its Jewish memory and with Jews from the nineteenth century to the present: José Amador de los Ríos’ efforts to incorporate 'Jewishness' into the canon of Spanish national literature and history; the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of the figure of the Jewish conspirator who seeks to foment revolutionary unrest in novels from Spain, Italy and France; the development of philosephardism and its interconnections with anti-Semitism, Spanish fascism and colonial ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century; the instrumentalization of the Spanish Jewish past during the Second Republic; the role of philosemitism in the development of Catalan nationalism; and the relationship between the memory of Sepharad and Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Spain. This book is based on a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.




Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain


Book Description

These interdisciplinary essays focus on how cultural practices help form the Spanish identity, by introducing a range of theoretical debates and exploring specific areas of 20th century Spanish culture.




Crafting the Female Subject


Book Description

Susan McKenna presents the innovative narratives of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Spain's preeminent nineteenth-century female writer, in Crafting the Female Subject.