Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain is a wide-ranging discussion of women's writing and representations of gender in Spanish literature and culture from the Romantic period to the fin de siecle. It is customary to regard gender roles and representation in nineteenth-century Spain as polarized and predictable. But in this volume, leading scholars from the UK and USA not only discuss the patriarchal emphasis of Spanish culture, but also demonstrate that this was a period in which the relations between men and women were being constantly negotiated, challenged, and redefined as part of an on-going transformation of political and national identities. Contributions look at women's writing and the representation of women in canonical texts, the construction of both femininity and masculinity, issues of race and region, and popular fiction, journalism, and the visual arts. All quotations are given in Spanish and in English translation.

Lou Charnon-Deutsch is the author of Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women (Pennsylvania State UP). Jo Labanyi is the author of Galdos (Longman, 1994) and of The Politics of the Family in the Spanish Realist Novel (Clarendon Press, forthcoming 1996). She is the co-editor of OUP's forthcoming Introduction to Spanish Cultural Studies.