Latin American women have long written essays on topics ranging from gender identity and the female experience to social injustice, political oppression, lack of educational opportunities, and the need for female solidarity in a patriarchal environment. But this rich vein of writing has often been ignored and is rarely studied.

This volume of twenty-one original studies by noted experts in Latin American literature seeks to recover and celebrate the accomplishments of Latin American women essayists. Taking a variety of critical approaches, the authors look at the way women writers have interpreted the essay genre, molded it to their expression, and created an intellectual tradition of their own. Some of the writers they treat are Flora Tristan, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni, Rosario Ferre, Christina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska.

This book is the first of a two-volume project that will reexamine the Latin American essay from a feminist perspective. The second volume, also edited by Doris Meyer, contains thirty-six essays in translation by twenty-two women authors.

Nellie Campobello, a prominent Mexican writer and "novelist of the Revolution," played an important role in Mexico's cultural renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s, along with such writers as Rafael Munoz and Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes and artists Diego Rivera, Orozco, and others. Her two novellas, Cartucho (first published in 1931) and My Mother's Hands (first published as Las manos de Mama in 1938), are autobiographical evocations of a childhood spent amidst the violence and turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico. Campobello's memories of the Revolution in the north of Mexico, where Pancho Villa was a popular hero and a personal friend of her family, show not only the stark realism of Cartucho but also the tender lyricism of My Mother's Hands. They are noteworthy, too, as a first-person account of the female experience in the early years of the Mexican Revolution and unique in their presentation of events from a child's perspective.

Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo were the two most influential and respected women writers of twentieth-century Latin America. Mistral, a plain, self-educated Chilean woman of the mountains who was a poet, journalist, and educator, became Latin America's first Nobel Laureate in 1945. Ocampo, a stunning Argentine woman of wealth, wrote hundreds of essays and founded the first-rate literary journal Sur. Though of very different backgrounds, their deep commitment to what they felt was "their" America forged a unique intellectual and emotional bond between them. This collection of the previously unpublished correspondence between Mistral and Ocampo reveals the private side of two very public women. In these letters (as well as in essays that are included in an appendix), we see what Mistral and Ocampo thought about each other and about the intellectual and political atmosphere of their time (including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the dictatorships of Latin America) and particularly how they negotiated the complex issues of identity, nationality, and gender within their wide-ranging cultural connections to both the Americas and Europe.

The "first lady of Argentine letters," Victoria Ocampo is best known as the architect of cultural bridges between the American and European continents and as the founder and director of Sur, an influential South American literary review and publishing house.

In this first biographical study in English of "la superbe Argentine," originally published in 1979, Doris Meyer considers Victoria Ocampo's role in introducing European and North American writers and artists to the South American public--through the pages of her review, through translations of their work, and through lecture tours and recitations. She examines Ocampo's personal relationships with some of the most illustrious writers and thinkers of this century--including Jose Ortega y Gasset, Rabindranath Tagore, Count Hermann Keyserling, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Monnier, Vita Sackville-West, Gabriela Mistral, and many others. And she portrays an extraordinary woman who rebelled against the strictures of family and social class to become a leading personality in the fight for women's rights in Argentina and, later, a steadfast opponent of the Peron regime, for which she was sent to jail in 1953.

Fifteen of Victoria Ocampo's essays, selected from her more than ten volumes of prose and translated by Doris Meyer, complement the biographical study.

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"The essays are clearly chosen to be different in style and content from the 'malestream' canon, and the book as a whole is full of old friends and welcome new surprises.... It will be of interest not only to Latin Americanists, but also to the wider community interested in non-European gender studies and cultural studies." --Debra A. Castillo, Cornell University

Latin American intellectual history is largely founded on essayistic writing. Women's essays have always formed a part of this rich tradition, yet they have seldom received the respect they merit and are often omitted entirely from anthologies.

This volume and its earlier companion, Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, seek to remedy that neglect. This book collects thirty-six notable essays by twenty-two women writers, including Flora Tristan, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Alfonsina Storni, Rosario Ferre, Christina Peri Rossi, and Elena Poniatowska. All of the essays are here translated into English for the first time, many by the same scholars who wrote critical studies of the authors in the first volume. Each author's work is also prefaced by a brief biographical sketch.

Reading these essayists is essential for gaining an understanding of Latin American literature and culture. Work focuses on feminine perspective, and in doing so, proposes a reinterpretation of the history of the genre. Includes analyses of better-knownwomen writers: Clorinda Matto de Turner, Gabri