Congratulations to Dr. Elizabeth Lagresa-González, Assistant Professor of Spanish, for receiving a SSHRC Insight Development Grant to assist with her research project titled “Re-Imagining the Spanish Novella: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Fiction by Women (1635-1700)”.
About the research project:
In the scope of Spanish literature of the 17th century, the “novela corta” (short prose fiction) occupies a complex place as a popular, though unwieldy, category. Lacking in formal generic precepts and associated with ‘lowly’ entertainment, novellas were particularly suited for literary experimentation and grew into a variety of subgenres that complicate conventional classifications. Reflective of an increasingly globalized world brought about by exploration, trade, warfare and migration, novellas are a crucial site of study for the hierarchies that would come to define the Early Modern world, including the Transatlantic and Mediterranean spaces.
Despite growing academic attention, this field suffers from an acute lack of resources devoted to the study of female novella writers. I intend to shift the discussion to genuinely incorporate the production of its only four known female contributors: María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1637 and 1647), Leonor de Meneses (1655), Mariana de Carvajal y Saavedra (1663) and Ana Francisca Abarca de Bolea y Mur (1679). While some of their works have been examined in a discrete manner, no academic study has considered the question of female authorship in this period as a potent question in itself. This project will be the first study to analyze all four authors in a comparative manner, as well as situate them within the larger scope of late-stage novella creation in Spain.
