Kathleen McNerney

Nancy Vosburg

The Garden across the Border begins with a general introduction to Merce Rodoreda's life and work, an orientation to the collection itself, and a brief chronology by Kathleen McNerney. The first three essays deal with La placa del Diamant, Rodoreda's best-known and widely translated novel. Enric Bou considers the various kinds of exile Rodoreda underwent: political, geographic, linguistic, and personal. Patricia Hart compares the novel with Francesc Betriu's 1982 film. Neus Carbonell, using Julia Kristeva's theories of the symbolic order and interpretations of the biblical myth of origin, relates the questions of identity to the absence of the mother and the imposition of silence. Several essays deal with Rodoreda's lesser-known novels. Donna McGiboney also uses the theories of Kristeva but to examine La mort i la primavera. Elizabeth Scarlett discusses Jardi vora el mar and Mirall trencat, particularly with regard to Rodoreda's well-known flower imagery. Janet Perez deals with Mirall trencat as a gothic novel. Gonzalo Navajas addresses Mirall trencat as well, using a postmodern approach. In her study of El carrer de les camelies, Kathleen Glenn returns to the picaresque novel. There are two studies of Rodoreda's prewar novels. Joan Ramon Resina pinpoints the surprising fact that Crim is a parodic reflection of the detective novel. Randolph Pope's scrutiny of the two versions of Aloma leads him to conclude that the second constitutes a kind of censorship of the first. Viatges i flors is a transition piece in Rodoreda's work. It is a series of vignettes written in lyrical prose. Nancy Vosburg explores metaphors of rootedness, exile, displacement, and wandering in contrast with enclosure, protection, and imprisonment. The rest of the essays focus on Rodoreda's short stories. Josep Miguel Sobrer concentrates on the male protagonists in three stories; he sees a duality between women and men. Ana Rueda goes back into the development of fantastic fiction to explain Rodoreda who crafts, she claims, a modern fantasy. Emilie Bergmann isolates a specific historical period - 1938 - to study the development of Rodoreda's early fiction. And, in concentrating on a single story, "La salamandra," Elizabeth Rhodes brings together many of the constants.

Mercè Rodoreda's Fiction

The Garden Across the Border

Jacky Collins

Lesbian Realities/Lesbian Fictions in Contemporary Spain focuses exclusively on manifestations of lesbian cultures and identities in contemporary Spain. Bringing together key essays from a range of international scholars, this anthology of critical essays examines the changing cultural, sociological and political landscape of Spain at the turn of the millennium. Divided into two sections, the first contributions focus on the realities of lesbian lives and looks at how Spanish lesbian identities are constructed through language and the media. The essays in the second section analyze contemporary lesbian identities as manifested in novels and short stories published since the late 1980s by authors such as Carme Riera, Lola van Guardia, Flavia Company and Mabel GalOn. The aim of this volume is to provide a significant and coherent contribution in English to the body of knowledge within an evolving subject area that has remained relatively under-researched until recently. This is an invaluable publication for teachers and students of Spanish cultural studies, global sexuality and gender studies.

Lesbian Realities/Lesbian Fictions in Contemporary Spain

Iberian Crime Fiction is the first volume in English to provide an extensive overview of crime fiction in Spain and Portugal. While the origins of peninsular crime fiction are traced in Nancy Vosburg's introductory chapter to the volume, the essays focus on specific topics that provide readers with a sense of the development of the genre in the second half of the 20th-century and current trends in the 21st-century. Patty Hart, whose The Spanish Sleuth introduced English-speaking readers to early crime fiction in Spain, provides a summary account of the development of the crime novel from the 1950s through the 1980s, highlighting the major authors and works that set the stage for the boom that followed the establishment of the novela negra tradition in the 1970s. This tradition, spearheaded by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, is the subject of a separate essay by Maria Balibrea that analyzes the socio-political conditions that gave rise to the novela negra. NancyVosburg studies the emergence of a feminine/feminist crime novel in the 1980s and 1990s and the subversion of masculine codes associated with crime fiction, while Stewart King analyzes crime fiction from the Catalan, Basque, and Galician autonomous regions of Spain, focusing on the political realities that resulted in a different use of the genre as a vehicle of regional nationalism. David Knutson traces contemporary trends in Spanish crime fiction, beginning in the 1990s and up to the present. Paul Castro's essay documents the emergence of crime fiction in Portugal and the major works/authors through to the present.

Iberian Crime Fiction

Nina L. Molinaro

Crime fiction written by women in Spain and Latin America since the late 1980s has been successful in shifting attention to crimes often overlooked by their male counterparts, such as rape and sexual battery, domestic violence, child pornography, pederasty, and incest. In the twenty-first century, social, economic, and political issues, including institutional corruption, class inequality, criminalized oppression of immigrant women, crass capitalist market forces, and mediatized political and religious bodies, have at their core a gendered dimension. The conventions of the original noir, or novela negra, genre have evolved, such that some women authors challenge the noir formulas by foregrounding gender concerns while others imagine new models of crime fiction that depart drastically from the old paradigms. This volume, highlighting such evolution in the crime fiction genre, will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of crime fiction in Latin America and Spain, to those interested in crime fiction by women, and to readers familiar with the sub-genres of crime fiction, which include noir, the thriller, the police procedural, and the “cozy” novel.

Nancy Vosburg

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