Fictions of the Feminine in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press

Lou Charnon-Deutsch is Professor of Hispanic Languages at the State University of New York–Stony Brook. Her previous books include The Nineteenth-Century Spanish Short Story: Textual Strategies of a Genre in Evolution (1985), Gender and Representation: Women in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Realist Fiction (1990), and Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women (1994).

“Fictions of the Feminine is a well-conceived and eloquently argued book that breaks new ground in nineteenth-century Spanish feminist and cultural studies. Each chapter forms a cohesive unit, with the illustrations, numerous and well chosen, facilitating the understanding of the overall project of the book. The thoroughness of the research involved in its preparation (over two thousand images were consulted by the author), together with her original commentaries on these images, is indeed impressive. Charnon-Deutsch should be commended for a superb job in combining her knowledge of nineteenth-century history, politics, and culture (including a variety of representational media, from ‘high’ literature to popular magazines) with the critical insights of contemporary feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural theories. Fictions of the Feminine represents the best in nineteenth-century Spanish feminist and cultural criticism and will be indispensable reading for all those interested in nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and gender studies.”—Akiko Tsuchiya, Washington University, St. Louis