Space is critical to imaginative writing. As English novelist Elizabeth Bowen has observed: 'nothing can happen nowhere'. This book offers an interdisciplinary framework for reading novels, and in particular women's fiction in Spanish America, with a focus on geoplot, on space rather than time as the narrative engine. Following the work of Lefebvre and Friedman, the author examines recent works by Spanish America's most visible women novelists - Angeles Mastretta [Mexico], Isabel Allende [Chile], Rosario Ferré [Puerto Rico], Sara Sefchovich [Mexico] and Laura Restrepo [Colombia] -and the ways in which their female protagonists challenge the spatial barriers erected by capitalist hegemony. Margins, borders, liminal spaces, the chora-space, and the body are emphasized as potential sites of transgression. The analysis identifies spatial negotiation as a mechanism both for cementing and for undermining authority, thus exposing the strategies through which literature constructs and represents power. SUSAN CARVALHO is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky, and Director of the Middlebury College Spanish School.

A ground-breaking synthesis of locational feminism, cultural geographies, and the strategies by which five of Spanish America's most widely read women authors construct identity and question societal hierarchies through the negotiation of space, power, and agency. The author [...] provides a compelling study. [...] This study is a valuable resource for graduate students and scholars, non-Hispanists included, who are interested in interdisciplinary and/or geographic approaches to contemporary literatures. The substance of its first two chapters and its significant bibliography together synthesize two decades of vital writings on feminism, postcoloniality, and transnationalism with more recent work on cultural geographies and the body, offering a unified framework for space- and place-based approaches to literature.'

Source: Contemporary Women's Writing

A well written and illuminating study [.] which will be of interest to many students and scholars in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies.'

Source: Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

Carvalho's interdisciplinary study on place and space in literary works is a valuable addition to critical works on Spanish American women's writing.'

Source: British Bulletin of Publications