Voices of the contemporary Puerto Rican short story

During the decades of the seventies, eighties and into the nineties in Puerto Rico, there has been a long-awaited boom in the production and publication of short stories by female authors. Stories of women, a catch-all phrase which includes women who write short fiction as well as women who appear in short stories, have made an explosive impact on modern Puerto Rican literature by introducing a fresh, new vision and a traditionally silenced voice to a genre, long considered to be of minor importance in literature. This study represents an in-depth analysis of the role of women in the contemporary Puerto Rican short story, as both character and the author. It\u27s principal goal is the legitimization a literature that has long been relegated to second-class status in Spanish, Latin American and North American letters. The works of prominent, but scarcely-known Puerto Rican short story writers are investigated, focusing primarily on short narratives written by Pedro Juan Soto, Rosario Ferre and Ana Lydia Vega. This thesis analyzes the character of the woman starting with the masterpiece Spiks by Soto in the 1950\u27s and continuing on to the current short fiction written by Ferre, Vega and other Puerto Rican writers from the island and the mainland. The main focus is the three authors mentioned above, since they best represent both the evolution and culmination of the contemporary short story in Puerto Rico