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Se estudian en este trabajo las primeras novelas históricas de autoría femenina que nos ha legado el siglo XIX, poco valoradas o casi ignoradas por la crítica hasta el momento: la obra original de Casilda Cañas de Cervantes La española misteriosa y el ilustre aventurero, o sean, Orval y Nonui (1833), así como otras tres novelas que se presentan como traducciones del francés: Zulima (1817), de Micaela Nesbitt y Calleja, Reynaldo y Elina o la sacerdotisa peruana (1820), de Antonia Tovar y Salcedo, y La invención del órgano o Abassa y Bermécides (1831) de María Belloumini. El estudio y el análisis conjunto de estas cuatro novelas firmadas por mujeres nos permitirá situar en el período fernandino (1814-1832) el inicio de una tendencia característica de la escritura femenina decimonónica, el cultivo de la novela histórica, que conocemos hasta la fecha fundamentalmente a través de las obras escritas a partir del medio siglo por Pilar Sinués, Ángela Grassi o Teresa Arróniz. Relacionaremos las tres supuestas traducciones con sus fuentes –alguna de ellas, como es el caso de Reynaldo y Elina, desconocida hasta el momento–, lo cual nos permitirá comprobar que estas versiones constituyen un magnífico ejemplo de la voluntad de trasvase y adaptación de la literatura francesa a nuestro ámbito cultural en un período histórico, el primer tercio del siglo XIX, caracterizado por la escasa producción narrativa de factura nacional.

In this study I show that from the middle of the nineteenth century on, there emerged a number of talented women writers in Mexico who challenged their male colleagues' reductive textual representations of women and their attempts to limit their sphere of action and silence their voices. These women effectively negotiated an ever widening space for themselves and later generations of women, by appropriating the rhetorical strategies of their male counterparts for their own liberationist ends. They transformed the predominant topoi for the construction of female subjects in their representations of themselves within their texts and displayed their mastery of all the topics that had been described by some of the most important Mexican writer statesmen as beyond the reach of their inferior feminine minds. They managed to simultaneously follow and defy the roles that their male counterparts had defined for them through the use of a double discourse. In order to set the stage for these transformations, we contextualize the experiences and education of these women within the broader history of eighteenth and nineteenth century Mexico in the first chapter. We are careful to consider at all times the specific class origins of these women and the particularity of their opportunities as well as of the limiting prescriptions for their behavior. To do so we take from the works of several specialists on Mexican women's history the data that corresponds to women of the middle and upper classes to which the writers belonged, and check it against the biographical information we possess about them. We describe the changes of mentality and circumstances that began in the eighteenth century that made the appearance of these women writers possible in a variety of Mexican periodicals and anthologies from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. We then examine representative texts about women, written by some of the most influential Mexican writer-statesmen of the period, and in particular one by Francisco Zarco. We use his text to dissemble the liberals attack on women in general and on (dangerous) women writers in particular. We expose the purposes of his astute rhetorical strategies, and place his campaign in the context of the liberals' challengers: the monarchists and the liberal women within their circle who had their own thoughts and literary talents as well as access to the corridors of power. In the third chapter, we explore a wide array of poetic texts by a number of women writers from the second half of the nineteenth century to show how some of them appropriated the ambiguous rhetoric of a Zarco to realize their own liberationist ends.

A finales de los años 20 las mujeres españolas que buscaban abrirse paso en el mundo de la poesía crearon una serie de vínculos que se disolvieron con la llegada de la guerra civil. Hasta ahora apenas se ha subrayado esta característica por la fuerte ruptura que supuso para ellas la guerra civil y la experiencia del exilio. Para recuperar la vivencia de unidad que de hecho se produjo en aquellos años es necesario acudir a los testimonios contemporáneos. La publicación de fondos epistolares y documentación sobre las poetas de los años 20 y 30 permite hacer una aproximación adecuada a este fenómeno. De estos materiales me he servido para arrojar una nueva luz sobre el desarrollo de la literatura femenina en España.

En el presente trabajo me referiré a la relación, en un plano temático y estructural que puede establecerse entre Cuadernos de infancia (1937) de la argentina Lange con los de otra escritora preterida y recuperada para el canon de la literatura mexicana: Nellie Campobello, quien compuso en la misma época dos libros memorialísticos: Cartucho (1931) y Las manos de Mamá (1937). En particular, se trata de mostrar la concepción fragmentaria del relato autobiográfico en las dos escritoras y el valor de la mirada como focalización de la experiencia.------------This paper deals with the thematic and structural relations between, on the one hand, Cuadernos de infancia (1937) by the Argentinian woman writer Norah Lange, and, on the other, Cartucho and Las manos de Mamá by Nellie Campobello, a forgotten Mexican writer, shortly reinstallated inside the canon of Mexican literature. The target of the comparison consists in pointing out the fragmentary outlook of the autobiographical discourse in both Lange and Campobello, and the importance of the act of looking as the focal point of experience.