Nina L. Molinaro

Alicia Giménez Bartlett's popular crime series, organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermín Garzón, is arguably the most successful detective series in Spain of the last three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural, and she situates her discussion in Petra Delicado's contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.

Policing Gender and Alicia Gimenez Bartletts Crime Fiction

This study focuses on Esther Tusquets's published work (four novels and a collection of short stories) and elaborates a potential aesthetics of power as it is manifested in and through narrative. The five analytical chapters are framed by an introduction and a conclusion that suggest theoretical issues and approaches.

Reading Esther Tusquets

Foucault, Feminism, and Power

Nancy Vosburg

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.

From Noir to Gris

Spanish and Latin American Women’s Crime Fiction in the New Millennium

Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s popular crime series, written in Spanish and organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermin Garzon, is arguably the most successful detective series published in Spain during the previous three decades. Nina L. Molinaro examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural. She argues that even as the series incorporates gender differences into the crime series formula, it does so in order to correct women, naturalize men’s authority, sanction social hierarchies, and assuage collective anxieties. As Molinaro shows, with the exception of the protagonist, the women characters require constant surveillance and modification, often as a result of men’s supposedly intrinsic protectiveness or excessive sexuality. Men, by contrast, circulate more freely in the fictional world and are intrinsic to the political, psychological, and economic prosperity of their communities. Molinaro situates her discussion in Petra Delicado’s contemporary Spain of dog owners, ¡Hola!, Russian cults, and gated communities.

Policing Gender and Alicia Giménez Bartlett's Crime Fiction

Inmaculada Pertusa-Seva

The present volume reviews and revisits the life and work of Spanish writer, editor, and intellectual Esther Tusquets (1936–2012). The author of some seven novels, three collections of short stories, two books for children, seven volumes of essays and memoirs, and an extensive corpus of journalistic and other short prose texts, Tusquets’s contributions to contemporary Spanish culture and literature are vast and heterogeneous. Most academic scholarship to date has been dedicated to Tusquets’s groundbreaking novelistic trilogy (El mismo mar de todos los veranos [1978], El amor es un juego solitario [1979], Varada tras el último naufragio [1980]) and to her unified short-story collection, Siete miradas en el mismo paisaje (1979). The essays contained in Esther Tusquets: Scholarly Correspondences offer new readings of the author’s canonical fiction and delve into the largely unexplored terrain of her non-fiction. Participating faculty-scholars include Nina L. Molinaro (University of Colorado at Boulder); Maureen Tobin Stanley (University of Minnesota Duluth); Inmaculada Pertusa-Seva (Western Kentucky University); Laura Lonsdale (Queen’s College, University of Oxford); Stacey Dolgin Casado (University of Georgia); Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway, University of London); María Elena Soliño (University of Houston); Mayte de Lama (Elon University); Catherine G. Bellver (University of Nevada, Las Vegas); Rosalía Cornejo Parriego (University of Ottawa); Meri Torras Francès (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona); and Mary S. Vázquez (Davidson College). The volume concludes with a complete bibliography by Tiffany L. Malloy of works by and about Tusquets.

Nina L. Molinaro

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