Reading the Feminine Voice in Latin American Women's Fiction: From Teresa de la Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela

From a comparative perspective and within the frameworks of feminist criticism and of Bakhtin's approach to language, María Teresa Medeiros-Lichem traces the evolution of Latin American women writers' participation in discourse. In this study of the theoretical and the fictional aspects of women's writing, Medeiros-Lichem reviews the leading trends of the Latin American feminist literary debate and the emergence of a feminine voice through language strategies in the fiction of nine innovative authors from the 1920s through the 1990s. The works of Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela are presented within the context of their theoretical writings that construct a feminist aesthetics and reflect their artistic philosophy. This book shows how much of women's fiction has often provided a space for the revelation of the multiple layers of feminine experience and the inscription of unrecorded events from a social and political reality marked by fear and oppression.