Synopses & Reviews
During the last decade, women's narrative has become a recognized force in Mexican letters. The essays in this collection explore the recent work of nine contemporary Mexican women writers. Many of the works have been translated into English; some, like Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, have become international best sellers. The unprecedented commercial success of these novels has generated mixed reactions: at the same time that the secondary status afforded women's narrative has come to be questioned in many academic circles, some authors are dissociating themselves from women's writing. The essays in this volume address these issues, providing a much needed contribution to the study of women's narrative.
Review
Ibsen's collection of 14 essays about nine writers offers several theoretically insightful, meticiously informative introductions to novelists who create "the other mirror," that is, invent characters who define themselves by subverting patriarchal norms whenever possible...The essays...offer valuable approaches to many significant Mexican women novelists.Choice
Review
Provides significant insights into the lives and literary and cultural production of Latin American women writers.MLN
Synopsis
Explores the recent work of nine contemporary Mexican women writers, including Laura Esquivel, Angeles Mastretta, and Elena Poniatowska.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [187]-197) and index.
About the Author
KRISTINE IBSEN is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Kristine Ibsen
Displacement: Strategies of Transformation in Angeles Mastretta's Arrancame la vida by Danny J. Anderson
Transgression in the Comic Mode: Angeles Mastretta and Her Cast of Liberated Aunts by Dianna Niebylski
?En donde van a florear?: Elena Poniatowska's La "Flor de Lis" and the Problematics of Identity by Jeanne Vaughn
Light-Writing: Biography and Photography in Elena Poniatowska's Tinisima by Beth E. Jorgensen
Tinisima: The Construction of the Self Through the Structures of Narrative Discourse by Charlotte Ekland
Historiographic Metafiction or the Rewriting of History in Carmen Boullosa's Son vacas, somos puercos by Cynthia M. Tompkins
Cross-Dressing and the Birth of a Nation: Duerme by Carmen Boullosa by Salvador Oropesa
On Recipes, Reading, and Revolution: Postboom Parody in Como agua para chocolate by Kristine Ibsen
Storytelling in Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate by Yael Halevi
The Sound of Silence: Voices of the Marginalized in Cristina Pacheco's Narrative by Linda Egan
The Transformation of the Reader in Maria Luisa Puga's Panico o peligro by Florence Moorhead-Rosenberg
Growing Up Jewish in Mexico: Sabina Berman's La bobe and Rosa Nissan's Novia que te vea by Darrell B. Lockhart
Barbara Jacobs: Gendered Subjectivity and the Epistolary Essay by Maria Concepcion Bados-Ciria
Selected Bibliography
Index