Anja Louis – författare

This collection of essays confirms Carmen de Burgos’s pivotal place in Spanish feminist history by bringing together eminent international scholars who offer new readings of Burgos’s work. It includes the analyses of a number of lesser-known texts, both fictional and non-fictional, which give us a more comprehensive examination of Burgos’s multipronge feminist approach. Burgos’s works, especially her essays, are essential feminist reading and complement other European and North American traditions. Gaining familiarity with the breadth and depth of her work serves not only to provide an understanding of Spanish firstwave feminism, but also enriches our appreciation of cultural studies, gender studies, subaltern studies and travel literature. Looking at the entirety of her life and work, and the wide-ranging contributions in this volume, it is evident that Burgos embodied the tensions between tradition and modernity, depicting multiple representations of womanhood. Encouraging women to take ownership of their personal fashion, the design of their homes and the decorum of their families were steps towards recognizing a female population that was cognizant of its own desires.

This collection of essays confirms Carmen de Burgos’s pivotal place in Spanish feminist history by bringing together eminent international scholars who offer new readings of Burgos’s work. It includes the analyses of a number of lesser-known texts, both fictional and non-fictional, which give us a more comprehensive examination of Burgos’s multipronge feminist approach. Burgos’s works, especially her essays, are essential feminist reading and complement other European and North American traditions. Gaining familiarity with the breadth and depth of her work serves not only to provide an understanding of Spanish firstwave feminism, but also enriches our appreciation of cultural studies, gender studies, subaltern studies and travel literature. Looking at the entirety of her life and work, and the wide-ranging contributions in this volume, it is evident that Burgos embodied the tensions between tradition and modernity, depicting multiple representations of womanhood. Encouraging women to take ownership of their personal fashion, the design of their homes and the decorum of their families were steps towards recognizing a female population that was cognizant of its own desires.

Recent social and political events in Spain have prompted a resurgence of feminism in the Spanish public sphere. Popular culture intervenes in these debates, and television does so specifically through the dramas which foreground female stories and female subjects, in many cases redefining and interpreting key moments in the progression of national gender politics. This pioneering study maps these developing concerns onto a selection of TV dramas which centre on feminisms and female identities, and as such are key interlocutors in social change. Our intention is to mainstream Spanish television studies and, in our analysis of its innovative and varied approach to gender politics, to take it out of the ‘interpretative isolation ward’ (Smith 2006). This monograph fills a significant gap in the literature on transnational popular culture; it is ground-breaking in its interdisciplinarity (television, modern languages, gender studies) and is the first of its kind in English.