Women S Fiction From Latin America

Evelyn Picon Garfield has chosen selections from the prose works of twelve female authors representing seven Latin American countries to create a collection which speaks to a variety of issues and exhibits a pastiche of richly varied artistic styles. Containing short stories, a one-act play, and excerpts from novels, the volume touches on such topics as political commitment and persecution, regional ethnicity of African and Indian cultures, social issues between classes and races, misogyny, the complexities of the human psyche, and female solidarity. Garfield includes works from the six authors she interviewed for her Women's Voices from Latin America, and has added selections from six other writers including Isabel Allende and Clarice Lispector.

Celia Correas de Zapata, an internationally recognized expert in the field of Latin American fiction written by women, has collected stories by thirty-one authors from fourteen countries, translated into English by such renowned scholars and writers as Gregory Rabassa and Margaret Sayers Peden. Contributors include Dora Alonso, Rosario Ferré, Elena Poniatowska, Ana Lydia Vega, and Luisa Valenzuela. The resulting book is a literary tour de force, stories written by women in this hemisphere that speak to cultures throughout the world. In her Foreword, Isabel Allende states, “This anthology is so valuable; it lays open the emotions of writers who, in turn, speak for others still shrouded in silence.”

What is the relationship between history and fiction in a place with a contentious past? And of what concern is gender in the telling of stories about the past? This study explores these questions as it considers key Central American texts.

In the last two decades Latin American literature has received great critical acclaim in the English-speaking world, although attention has been focused primarily on the classic works of male literary figures such as Borges, Paz, and Cortázar. More recently, studies have begun to evaluate the works of established women writers such as Sor Juana Iné

The selections included in this anthology centre on three major aspects of women's writing: reflections on writing and its relation to the public self, the figuration of a female textual identity, and women as agents of history and ideology.

During the past 10 years, the situation of women writers in Latin America has dramatically changed as has the interest the reading public has shown in their work. In the United States, the rise of women's studies programs has fostered a heightened awareness of literature written by women. Publishers have noted the growing significance of Latin American women writers and have responded by increasing the availability of the work of these women. Thus many anthologies now include English translations of Latin American short fiction written by women. The inclusion of Latin American short fiction in anthologies has made the work of these women more available to students, but the collections in which particular works appear are sometimes difficult to locate. This reference provides a full listing of these anthologies and the works contained in them. The first part of the volume contains entries for 165 anthologies published between 1938 and 1996. The entries are arranged alphabetically by editor or author and each provides full bibliographic information and a list of all short stories and novel excerpts by Latin American women authors contained in the work. The nationality of each author is cited parenthetically. These entries are assigned alphanumeric codes, which are cross-referenced in the volume's other indexes. The additional indexes allow the user to locate short fiction by author, country, and title. The volume concludes with a list of bibliographies of Latin American literature in translation.

The result of a collaboration among eight women scholars, this collection examines the history of women’s participation in literary, journalistic, educational, and political activity in Latin American history, with special attention to the first half of this century.