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 study in the interdisciplinary field of law and literature analyses the representation of law in the work of twentieth-century Spanish writer Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932). This study in the interdisciplinary field of law and literature analyses the representation of law in the work of twentieth-century Spanish writer Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932). Drawing on Anglo-American legal theory and Spanish historical practice, it argues that her narratives of legal critique were used as a means of political propaganda, in which she introduced the question of women's rights into the public domain. Burgos can be considered one ofthe most important proponents of the feminist movement in the lead-up to the Second Republic and presents a particularly interesting case study, since she combined her writing career with a political agenda. Given the remarkable similarities between de Burgos's critical analysis and recent feminist legal theory, her writings are still disturbingly relevant today. This study also explores the relationship between melodrama as a genre of manichean worldviews and law as a system of binary oppositions and discusses de Burgos's subversion of the former as a means to criticise the latter. Anja Louis is a lecturer in the Department of Spanish at the University of Sheffield.