El ensayo latinoamericano de escritoras: Asuntos de género literario, identidad femenina y concientización por la escritura

At the end of the twentieth century an increasing interest developed toward recovering Latin American women\u27s essays from their hidden place in the literary canon. New critical perspectives and anthologies by Latin American, Spanish and American scholars shed light to the study of a genre that traditional criticism had hitherto denied a place. This dissertation examines feminist conceptions of the essay and their influence in the use of the genre by Latin American women writers. Through the essay, women formulate their own understanding of their socio-cultural reality and their personal feminine experience and confront the hegemonic concept of history. They convey a message to other women exhorting them to further their education and to write their personal experiences as a means to women\u27s emancipation in Latin America. The legacy of patriarchal canons, having marginalized the women\u27s writing as female, subjective, and therefore incapable of conveying universal truth has presented barriers and challenges to the authorial “I” of the essayist as subject and author of the text. By relating all of this to contemporary postmodern theoretical perspectives this work addresses issues on writing, gender and genre, subjectivity and cultural identity and it proposes alternatives for a more regionally oriented Latin American literary criticism. It analyses the essays by four women writers of different times: Zoila Aurora Cáceres (1890), Victoria Ocampo (1930), Rosario Castellanos (1960) and Rosario Ferre (1970). These women directly intervened in the traditionally masculine domain of literary and journalistic writing, challenged the established models about their role and function as female subjects and agents in Latin America, and by developing a feminist consciousness, contributed to the region\u27s cultural history of feminism. This dissertation also reviews the extent to which these theories speak to the material reality of other Latin American women writers. This leads to a consideration of the region\u27s writers\u27 cultural, historical, and personal circumstances with respect to race, class, and gender. The study\u27s thrust, then, calls attention to the importance of the essay as a means of women\u27s voice. As a conclusion, it suggests a new reading of the Latin American feminine reality, from the region\u27s particularity