Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century: Virtue, Patriotism, Citizenship

by Christine Arkinstall

Overview

The ways in which women have historically authorized themselves to write on war has blurred conventionally gendered lines, intertwining the personal with the political. Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century explores, through feminist lenses, the cultural representations of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish women’s texts on war.

Reshaping the current knowledge and understanding of key female authors in Spain’s fin de siècle, this book examines works by notable writers – including Rosario de Acuña, Blanca de los Rios, Concepción Arenal, and Carmen de Burgos – as they engage with the War of Independence, the Third Carlist War, Spain’s colonial wars, and World War I. The selected works foreground how women’s representations of war can challenge masculine conceptualizations of public and domestic spheres. Christine Arkinstall analyses the works’ overarching themes and symbols, such as honour, blood, the Virgin and the Mother, and the intersecting sexual, social, and racial contracts. In doing so, Arkinstall highlights how these texts imagine outcomes that deviate from established norms of femininity, offer new models to Spanish women, and interrogate the militaristic foundations of patriarchal societies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487546267
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	12/19/2022
Series:	Toronto Iberic
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.75(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Christine Arkinstall is a professor of Spanish at the University of Auckland.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: From behind the Lines to Writing War’s Texts: Redrawing the Boundaries of War and Gender

1. Love of Nation and Women’s Citizenship in Rosario de Acuña’s Amor a la patria (1877)

2. Gender, Casticismo, and Imperial Nations in Spain’s fin de siècle: Blanca de los Ríos’s Sangre española (1899)

3. Charity, Patria, and Painting War’s Pain: Concepción Arenal’s Writings, 1869–79

4. The Monstrosity of War and Justpeace: Concepción Arenal’s Cuadros de la guerra and Ensayo sobre el Derecho de Gentes

5. Getting Intimate with Empire: Fin-de-Siècle Women Writing a Psychology of the Disaster

6. Disordering the Imperial Home: Blanca de los Ríos’s La niña de Sanabria (1907)

7. Purity of Blood in the National Family? Spain’s War in Morocco in Carmen de Burgos’s En la guerra (Episodios de Melilla) (1909)

8. Between Feminist Aspirations and Pacifist Ideals: Burgos’s Essays on World War I and Women in War

9. Denouncing War’s Broken Syntax: Burgos’s World War I Novellas

Conclusion: Transforming Moral Maps, Then and Now

Notes

References

Index

What People are Saying About This

Alda Blanco

"Christine Arkinstall charts the cultural representation of war by Spanish female writers by exploring the work of major recognized authors (Concepción Arenal, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Carmen de Burgos) and those that are lesser known today (Rosario de Acuña, Blanca de los Ríos, and Consuelo Alvarez Pool). This book is quite simply groundbreaking. Not only does Arkinstall encompass　the most significant texts produced by these authors, but brilliantly demonstrates the ways in which women's depictions of war challenge masculine conceptions of the private and domestic spheres, a masculine war canon, and, importantly, masculine valorizations of what and whose experiences count in times of war."

Lou Charnon-Deutsch

"Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century is unrivalled in studies on war in relation to Spanish women writers, drawing on a wide panorama of sources to reveal women's unrecognized preoccupation with war. What readers will take away from this book is that Spanish women writers challenged the knotty problem of conventional gender roles and the modern thrust for women's rights embedded in their war stories and essays."

Silvia Bermúdez

"Women on War in Spain's Long Nineteenth Century is a groundbreaking examination of how 'the boundaries of war and gender' were radically transformed by six Spanish women authors writing on war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meticulously researched, incisively written book is a fundamental contribution to the field and to the historiography of Iberian feminisms."

Editorial Reviews

" Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century is a groundbreaking examination of how ‘the boundaries of war and gender’ were radically transformed by six Spanish women authors writing on war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meticulously researched, incisively written book is a fundamental contribution to the field and to the historiography of Iberian feminisms."

—Silvia Bermúdez, Professor of Literature and Iberian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

" Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century is unrivalled in studies on war in relation to Spanish women writers, drawing on a wide panorama of sources to reveal women’s unrecognized preoccupation with war. What readers will take away from this book is that Spanish women writers challenged the knotty problem of conventional gender roles and the modern thrust for women’s rights embedded in their war stories and essays."

—Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Emeritus Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature, Stony Brook University

"Christine Arkinstall charts the cultural representation of war by Spanish female writers by exploring the work of major recognized authors (Concepción Arenal, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Carmen de Burgos) and those that are lesser known today (Rosario de Acuña, Blanca de los Ríos, and Consuelo Alvarez Pool). This book is quite simply groundbreaking. Not only does Arkinstall encompass　the most significant texts produced by these authors, but brilliantly demonstrates the ways in which women’s depictions of war challenge masculine conceptions of the private and domestic spheres, a masculine war canon, and, importantly, masculine valorizations of what and whose experiences count in times of war."

—Alda Blanco, Emerita Professor of Spanish Literary and Cultural Studies, San Diego State University

From the Publisher