The Language of Two Shores

Extract

Nuria Amat's view of literature between borders places her in the arduous trajectory of Spanish women writers, who have written their works from the periphery of Spanish fiction. Historically, few women have been among the canonical writers of Spain, and those who wrote were known for their ambivalent representations of their role as authors. Marginal writers of both sexes were forced to engage in literary disguises and subterfuges, “common and necessary practices for those who deviated from orthodoxy and convention” (Levine and Marson xxi). With the death of Franco in 1975, women writers of Spain such as Ana María Moix (b. 1947, Catalonia), Esther Tusquets (b. 1946, Catalonia), Marina Mayoral (b. 1942, Galicia), Lourdes Ortiz (b. 1943), Montserrat Roig (b. 1946, Catalonia), Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945, Barcelona), and Rosa Montero (b. 1951, Madrid) began to explore their personal and national histories as the censorship ended. There soon followed a boom of female writers, who, “encouraged by the feminist movement and by all the changing atmosphere of the seventies, were able to find marketing success that soon made them visible” (Nichols 11).