Poetry and the Realm of the Public Intellectual: The Alternative Destinies of Gabriela Mistral, Cecília Meireles, and Rosario Castellanos

ISBN-10: 1905981333
ISBN-13: 9781905981335
Category: Feminism in literature
Pages: 231
Language: English
Published: 2007
Publisher: MHRA
Author: Karen Patricia Peña

Description

Gabriela Mistral, Cecilia Meireles, and Rosario Castellanos were three of the most important Latin American women writers of the 20th century. Prolific, contentious, and widely read and discussed from Spanish America to Brazil, they pushed the boundaries of what it meant to be women poets from the 1920s to the 1970s. Karen Pena explores how these three writers used poetry to oppose patriarchal discourse on topics ranging from marginalised peoples to issues on gender and sexuality. Poetry was a means for them to redefine their own feminised space, however difficult or odd it could turn out to be. In this study, we see how Gabriela Mistral travels to Mexico and finds the countryside a way to declare her own queer identity; many years later we find her re-imagining a frightening feminine space where she contests the terrible fate of Greek heroines. In Cecilia Meireles, we discover a writer at odds with her femininity, who declares herself androgynous. Like Mistral, she too travelled extensively, and we see her arguing against the wealth of capitalism and industrialisation when she travels to the United States in 1940. Rosario Castellanos straightforwardly argues for women's procreative rights in almost all of her poetry. And in an illuminating re-reading of Mistral, Castellanos allows the shadow of her predecessor to vocalise the tragedies of the inability to control woman's reproductive choices.

Get the book

Similar books

The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry
By Stephen M. Hart
Neruda himself insisted he took his surname from the Czech writer Jan Neruda. Enrique Robertson has an alternative theory: that the true origins may lie in a poster announcing a concert by the violinist, Pablo Sarasate, and the cellist, ...
Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism
By Brenna Moore
Kindred Spirits takes us inside a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in ...
Latin American Literature in Transition 1930–1980: Volume 4
By Par Kumaraswami, Amanda Holmes
... Un tal Lucas [A Certain Lucas], and Divertimento [Divertissement], among others), and in his essay collections. Furthermore, Cortázar's informal musings on poetry and poetics, scribbled on scraps of paper he referred to as “papelitos,”4 ...
Gabriela Mistral's Letters to Doris Dana
By Velma García-Gorena
The Nobel Prize–winning poet Gabriela Mistral is celebrated by her native Chile as the “mother of the nation” even though she spent most of her life in Mexico, Europe, and the United States.
Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America
By Isabel C. Gómez
... Poetry and the Realm of the Public Intellectual : The Alternative Destinies of Gabriela Mistral , Cecília Meireles , and Rosario Castellanos . Leeds , UK : LEGENDA / Modern Humanities Research Association / Maney Publishing , 2007 ...
Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas
By Krista Brune
The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, edited by Christie McDonald and translated by Peggy Kamuf, U of Nebraska P, 1985. ———. “Des Tours de Babel.” Translated by Joseph F. Graham. Difference in Translation ...
The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature
By Ileana Rodríguez, Mónica Szurmuk
The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature is an essential resource for anyone interested in the development of women's writing in Latin America.
My Way: Speeches and Poems
By Charles Bernstein
After the publication of her Collected Poems in 1938 and two non-poetry books the following year, Riding published almost nothing for thirty years. In 1970, her Selected Poems-. In Five Sets was published under the name Laura (Riding) ...
The Underground Poetry Metro Transportation System for Souls: Essays on the Cultural Life of Poetry
By Tony Hoagland
... Society. When Bly began to publicly consider matters of American culture at large, something happened that should be of interest to all of us given to the vocation of poetry as it is practiced in America. He had become a public intellectual ...
Expanding Authorship: Transformations in American Poetry since 1950
By Peter Middleton
The two poets also started out with clearer ground rules than those with which Robinson and Hejinian set forth, a shared topic, and a more explicit framework with fewer formal constraints so that their contributions could be prose or ...