The Marketing and Reception of Women Writers in the Twenty-First Century Spanish Nation-State
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The Marketing and Reception of Women Writers in the Twenty-First Century Spanish Nation-State Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Jennifer Anne Rodriguez January 2016 1 Abstract The Marketing and Reception of Women Writers in the Twenty-First Century Spanish Nation-State By Jennifer Anne Rodriguez This thesis is a comparative study of the marketing and reception of women writers in the twenty-first century Spanish nation-state; more specifically, Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country and central Spain. This study analyses and discusses the strategies women writers in the Spanish nation-state use to achieve success and visibility within their respective literary fields, and also takes into account the complex situation that surrounds these women writers. As such, this thesis also discusses issues including language choice and national identity, as well as how women writers negotiate their position with their respective literary fields. Taking a cultural studies approach, this thesis takes eight women writers as case studies: María Xosé Queizán and María Reimóndez (Galicia); Mariasun Landa and Laura Mintegi (the Basque Country); Carme Riera and Maria de la Pau Janer (Catalonia); and Almudena Grandes and Lucía Etxebarria1 (central Spain) and examines the individual strategies they use to market their work and achieve success, associating themselves with canonical authors and careful use of paratexts such as prologues and epilogues. In addition, the reception of their mediated identities and their work is discussed through analysis of reviews and interviews in the press. This thesis shows that that women writers in the Spanish nation-state are engaged constantly in a complex negotiation of various inter-dependent factors. Achieving success – both economic and symbolic – is a complex process, and there may often be cases where economic success can be detrimental to symbolic success, or vice versa. However, if women writers in the Spanish nation-state are able to negotiate these complex inter-dependent factors, success – both economic and symbolic -, prestige and even canonisation are achievable. 1 The spelling of Etxebarria used in this thesis is the same as that which appears on the covers of Lucía Etxebarria’s novels. 2 Dedication I wish to dedicate this thesis to my father, who was my biggest supporter and always encouraged me in my studies. He did not live to see me graduate, but had a significant number of ‘dad jokes’ ready and waiting for when I did. 3 Acknowledgements Over the course of my four years of study, I have received such an overwhelming amount of help and support from colleagues and family members that there is not sufficient space to credit them all here. However, there are a few important people to whom I wish to express sincere gratitude for their assistance. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisors. Thanks to my first supervisor, Kirsty Hooper, whose enthusiasm for and knowledge of Iberian, and in particular, Galician literature inspired my initial interest in Galician women’s writing and gave me the encouragement I needed to pursue a postgraduate career. To Claire Taylor, who joined the team in the latter stages of my project, and whose invaluable comments and immense knowledge of literary theory, helped me to significantly improve my thesis. Finally, to Diana Cullell, my primary supervisor. She has been with me for the duration of the project and supported me, not only through the production of my thesis, but also through a particularly difficult period in my personal life. I now consider Diana to be not only a supervisor, but also a friend. I am also grateful for the funding I received from the University of Liverpool Edgar Allison Peers PhD Scholarship and the Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Scholarship, without which I would not have been able to undertake a PhD in Hispanic Studies, or conduct research at the Centre de Dona i Literatura at the University of Barcelona. Many thanks to the inspiring academics and writers I met while in Barcelona. To Helena González, who was my mentor during my year abroad and allowed me to be a part of the exciting and important project to digitize Galician feminist journals. To all my friends at the Centre: Adina, Lola, Meritxell, Hannah and, above all, Andrea; who discussed complex literary and cultural theories with me, who were there for me during a difficult time in my personal life and who showed me where to get the best tapas in Barcelona for 1€. Thanks also to my friends Elizabeth and Helga, who have been a constant source of support and helped me ‘set the world to rights’ on a number of occasions. 4 Finally, I would like to thank my family, without whom I probably would not have made it to university in the first place. They have encouraged me, helping me through difficult periods when I doubted myself and, on occasion, supported me financially. I could not have done this without them. 5 Preface The foundations of this thesis come from research into Galician women’s writing. This previous research was an analysis of approaches to Galician women’s narrative as well as suggestions for alternative approaches to Galician women’s narrative that would allow female-authored texts to contribute to the national narrative. While undertaking this research project, the women writers I was studying were sometimes analysed alongside other writers from the wider Spanish nation-state. It was then that I realised that there were similarities in the way that women writers were treated in the different autonomous communities, as well as in the way that the work of women writers was approached. I began to see that the Galician literary field was not an isolated one, but part of a complex wider literary context that crossed linguistic and geographical borders. From initial research into women’s writing and women writers elsewhere in the Spanish nation-state, I noticed that it was the strong feminist discourse that existed in Galician women’s writing that made this literary field different to all the others. Thus, this raised the question of why women writers and academics in other literary fields had decided against or openly rejected a feminist approach to literature. Thus, rather than the central Spanish literary field, the Galician literary field was my gateway into the world of women’s writing and women writers and, as such, is the starting point for this thesis. However, there was a particular event that made the focus of this thesis the mediated identities of the authors themselves and the reception of these identities, rather than any kind of literary textual analysis. This too, involved a writer from the Galician literary field. In 2010, the Galician writer María Reimóndez, who is also one of the case studies in this thesis, gave an undergraduate workshop on the notion of writing as a fabric and locating the different threads that tie a writer’s corpus together. Students were asked to read and comment on extracts from a number of Reimóndez’s texts, such as an article she wrote about Galician language education in the Galician autonomous community, excerpts from her children’s literature, personal musings of her experiences with her NGO in India, her acceptance speech for the Premio Plácido Castro translation prize, an excerpt from her novel O club de calceta and an article 6 about women and the nation. What was learned during the session was that Reimóndez’s contextual articles and speeches helped to shape the way in which we read the excerpts from the children’s literature and novel. An additional interesting aspect, in terms of this thesis, was what Reimóndez was wearing. Reimóndez was dressed plainly in blue or black trousers and a jumper, with her hair loose. This is not interesting in itself, except that on the back cover of her children’s book Pirata, there is a picture of Reimóndez stood in a courtyard looking up at the camera with her hair in plaits and wearing a purple top and wrapped in a bright pink/red pashmina. Thus, I was presented with two contrasting images of the author. These two images I had of Reimóndez as the ‘real’ writer and the mediated writer coupled with the contextual articles and speeches that had guided my reading of Reimóndez’s work raised the question as to what extent the promotional material and marketing strategies of writers affected the reception of their work. In addition, it raised the question as to whether, an analysis of the text occurred before reading the texts through a reading of the promotional materials. Although the above paragraphs are anecdotal, they provide an insight into the initial idea for this project and the position from which I am examining the case studies. This thesis does not analyse the above-mentioned case studies starting with the women writers from the central Spanish nation-state as this would reinforce the hierarchal structures of centre and periphery discussed by Even-Zohar. Instead this thesis will use the Galician literary field as a starting point. It will then discuss the marketing of women writers in the Basque literary field, which is Galicia’s closest neighbour in comparison with the other literary fields discussed in this thesis both in terms of geographical location and the size of the literary fields. It will then move to the Catalan literary field, which, as mentioned in the introduction, is much closer to the central Spanish literary field in terms of size and resources available. Finally, this thesis will discuss the marketing and reception of women writers in the central Spanish nation-state.