Latin American Women Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories

"The book highlights the many possibilities of the innovative work of these dramatists, and this will, it is to be hoped, help the editors to achieve one of their other key goals: productions of the plays in English." --Times Literary Supplement

"This thoughtfully crafted book with its insightful and informative studies elucidates an overlooked, essential component of the Latin American literary canon." --Choice

Contributors discuss 15 works of Latin-American playwrights, delineate the artistic lives of women dramatists of the last half of the twentieth century--from countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela--and highlight the problems inherent in writing under politically repressive governments.

Reflecting the burgeoning interest in Hispanic women writers, this volume focuses on a group of writers who have only recently been accorded the attention they so richly deserve. The editors organize the essays under four broad thematic headings: Theatrical Self--Consciousness, Politics, History, and Feminist Positions. Though playwrights included range from the recognized--such as Gámbaro (Gambaro) and Garro--to lesser--known yet nonetheless remarkable dramatists--e.g., Serebrisky--the volume would have profited from a broader geographic distribution: each chapter deals with one woman playwright, but 10 of the 15 come from either Mexico or Argentina. The editors concentrate on dramatists writing in the second half of the 20th century: the oldest author discussed was born in 1920, the youngest in 1960. All chapters follow an identical format: an introduction to the playwright... a description of her work in the theater... a more substantive analysis... of at least one specific text. This thoughtfully crafted book with its insightful and informative studies elucidates an overlooked, essential component of the Latin American literary canon. Recommended for courses supporting work at the upper--division undergraduate level and above.F. Colecchia, Duquesne University, Choice, November 1999 Indiana University Press

Catherine Larson is an Associate professor of Spanish and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is the author of Language and the Comedia: Theory and Practice and numerous articles on the theater of Golden Age Spain and twentieth-century Latin America, and she has co-edited Brave New Words: Studies in Spanish Golden Age Literature.

Margarita Vargas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the co-translator of The House on the Beach and co-editor of Women Writing Women: An Anthology of Spanish-American Theater of the 1980s. She has also published critical essays on Mexican literature and Spanish-American theater.