This volume offers a critical study of a representative selection of Latin American women writers who have made major contributions to all literary genres and represent a wide range of literary perspectives and styles. This volume offers a critical study of a representative selection of Latin American women writers who have made major contributions to all literary genres and represent a wide range of literary perspectives and styles. Many of these women have attained the highest literary honours: Gabriela Mistral won the Nobel Prize in 1945; Clarice Lispector attracted the critical attention of theorists working mainly outside the Hispanic area; others have made such telling contributions to particular strands of literature that their names are immediately evocative of specific currents or styles. Elena Poniatowska is associated with testimonial writing; Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel are known for the magical realism of their texts; others, such as Juana de Ibarbourou and Laura Restrepo remain relatively unknown despite their contributions to erotic poetry and to postcolonial prose fiction respectively. The distinctiveness of this volume lies in its attention to writers from widely differing historical and social contexts and to the diverse theoretical approaches adopted by the authors. Brigida M. Pastor teaches Latin American literature and film at the University of Glasgow . Her publications include Fashioning Cuban Feminism and Beyond, El discurso de Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda: Identidad Femenina y Otredad; and Discursos Caribenhos: Historia, Literatura e Cinema Lloyd Hughes Davies teaches Spanish American Literature at Swansea University. His publications include Isabel Allende, La casa de los espiritus and Projections of Peronism in Argentine Autobiography, Biography and Fiction.

These representative works by early Spanish American women writers are the first to be made available in a bilingual edition. The texts provide an overview of writers from the Colonial period to the nineteenth century. They include an exploration account, the vida of a mystic, an autobiography of a transvestite, poetry by Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, essays, and two novellas. While all of the writers shared being white and literate, their life experiences were extremely diverse, and themes of repression, both personal and political, permeate the collection. Scott's introduction emphasises the networks of friendship and support among women writers that developed, especially in the nineteenth century. The new translations make many of these texts available to English-speaking readers for the first time.