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OAKNÍN, MAZAL. FEMINISM, WRITING AND THE MEDIA IN SPAIN.

OXFORD, PETER LANG, 2019, 209 PP., ISBN 978-3-0343-1865-5

In line with the sociological shift in translation and literary studies, which

is experiencing increasing success nowadays, Professor Mazal Oaknín offers

us an essential work to delve into the evolution of women’s writing in Spain in

the twentieth century and how it is represented and constructed through the

meticulously by selecting an outstanding female writer for each sociohistorical

stage in Spain: (i) the post-Civil War dictatorship; (ii) the Transition to

democracy; and (iii) the period of post-Transition, Europeanisation and

globalisation. Her proposal goes from the general to the particular, following a

method of “concentric circles”: firstly, she starts by conceptualising “female

writing” in the world, then continues by analysing how Spanish female writers

have shown themselves to their readers and intellectual audience. Next, she

moves on to examine the construction of Matute’s, Montero’s and Etxebarría’s

personae and the response they have each individually given to the question

of the existence or not of so-called “female writing”.

making it more visible while placing it in a literary ghetto. Moreover, from the

very first chapter she includes a conscientious study on news published in the

Spanish literary magazine Qué leer to confirm or refute the famous statement

made by another Spanish writer, Almudena Grandes: “Women writers are

constantly forced to comment on the gender of the characters in their books,

whilst male writers are enviably privileged and exempt from this” (p.18).

Oaknín manages to quantify this reality by including all of the references to

the compatibility of housework and literary work, and the relationship between

female characters and female writers put forward in interviews published in

the magazine from 2009 to 2012.

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“universal anthologies”; the experiences of life which, due to social

conditioning, inevitably mark women’s writing; and the formal or structural

disparity of a “feminine” style as opposed to another “masculine” one.

In Chapter 2, “The Reception and Marketing of Women Writers in

Spain”, she introduces devastating numbers about the disparity between the

amount of Spanish women Arts graduates and the low number of female

writers in the literary world. There is also another aspect that constrains the

work of women writers: the prejudice in reviews about their work, as it seems

that a political stance or autobiographical projection is expected in their

novels.

multimodal material confirms the suspicions expressed by the researcher in

the previous chapter, which are rooted in Barthes’s postulates about the

absence of neutrality in cultural artefacts and practices that are commodified:

the interest of the publishing market blurs the boundary between women

writers’ personae and their characters (pp.57-58).

Chapter 3, “The Literary Market and the Construction of the Public

Personae and Women Writers”, represents the core of the book. It is

subdivided into three sections in which the history of the "women's writing

label" is studied in detail through the figure of a reluctant Matute; the protesting

yet free figure of Montero, who intended to establish a separation between her

was undeserved, she has escaped from the clutches of a publishing market

that makes the “feminisation” of literature and the inclusion of snippets of the

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For her part, Montero’s literature was born out of a period of transition:

from the publication of her Crónica del Desamor, which reflects the pressing

need to address contemporary political and legal issues facing women, to her

winning the Premio Primavera de Novela award in 1997, which led to her

experiencing the growing commercialism of the Spanish literary market and

the increasing pressure on authors to meet its demands. Indeed, she had to

work hard to keep the press out of her “domestic life” (p. 99).

Finally, Lucía Etxebarría is an example of a writer who actively builds

her own persona in the virtual world. However, an excessive degree of

a woman in a “marketplace that privileges men and exploits the multimedia

representation of the author, who is not immune to the sexualised and

objectified mass media approach to the female body” (p.111). Through her

example we will see how, despite the fact that the grip of Franco’s constraints

has already been loosened, the market is looking for new ways to exploit and

Finally, in Chapter 4, “Response of the three writers to the question of

the existence (or not) of ‘women’s writing’ “, it is the writers themselves who

look in the mirror and answer about their view of female writing. In this sense,

it is interesting to realise how the first post-Civil War writers shunned this label

be replicated in the near future to confirm whether the situation of these three

marketing which, instead of adding new voices to the traditional repertoire,

falls into the terrible contradiction of selling a poisoned apple of the usual

prejudices. In addition to an extensive bibliography, the author offers us a

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portray the literary corpus by women as an exotic phenomenon satisfying a

voyeuristic impulse without interpreting or including it as one of the true faces

of an increasingly diverse society and literature.

[MARÍA LUISA RODRÍGUEZ MUÑOZ]