Gender and Modernity in Spanish Literature

This book explores major Spanish women and men writers' reactions to manifestations of modernity such as Spain's waning power, the changing roles of women, the male hysteric, positivism, dream research, secularization, the advances of science, the uneven development of Spanish feminism, the dominance of the discourse of motherhood, and the transformation of the Don Juan figure. The book juxtaposes works by one female and one male author in each of the eight chapters, surveying literature beginning in the often-ignored Spanish Enlightenment, continuing to the nineteenth century of Romanticism and Realism, and ending in the early twentieth century of Modernism. The concept of modernity in Spain is explored from various vantage points including those of philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic, and sociological theorists as well as socio-historic contexts. Influential female and male writers of Spain demonstrate how disillusion in the face of modernity varies according to gender in a process of 'gendereddisillusion.' --