Forging bonds for the future

In September, the Spanish Sub-Faculty was fortunate to host early-career researcher Dr Raquel Fernández-Menéndez as recipient of the 2022 Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland  (AHGBI) Visiting International Fellowship. Raquel is currently preparing the manuscript for her thesis monograph, on the representation of women writers in poetic anthologies published during the Francoist dictatorship. Having been examined by Professor Xon de Ros in her PhD viva, Raquel was interested in undertaking a research stay in Oxford to consult some remaining sources in the libraries here in the final stages of her book, and Xon, aware of the many connections between our research interests, put us in touch. Both of us are early career academics working on women’s writing in Spain, focusing on poetry and prose respectively, and our current book projects revolve around questions about inclusion, exclusion, and ethics in view of the impact of the long dictatorship. Which works by women are included in poetic anthologies, which are not, and how do assumptions about gender and literary value shape this selection? Why have so few twentieth-century works by Spanish women writers been included in international discussions of life-writing to date, and what light does this shed on both the particular strategies of self-representation in these texts and our expectations as to what autobiographical writing looks like? Raquel’s stay in Oxford gave us the opportunity to start what we hope will be a longstanding collaboration around questions of this kind.  

Raquel’s forthcoming book puts celebrated (and male-authored) poetic anthologies such as Josep Maria Castellet Veinte años de poesía española [‘Twenty Years of Spanish Poetry’] (1960) and Leopoldo de Luis’s Poesía social. Antología 1939–1968 [‘Social Poetry. Anthology 1939–1968’] (1969) into dialogue with those that have received scant attention to date, including Carmen Conde’s Poesía femenina española viviente [‘Contemporary Women’s Poetry’] (1954). In recent years, literary historiography has afforded considerable attention to the influence of poetic anthologies on questions of canonicity, a burgeoning interest that coincides with the intensive work being carried out on the revision of curricula to address the near total lack of female writers. The analysis of the relationship between women poets and anthologies has generally been carried out, however, from a philological perspective, often enriched by contributions from the field of women’s history. While this has resulted in progress in terms of more inclusive lists to define the history of literature, it has not led to the more in-depth consideration of what Iris M. Zavala highlighted in her Breve historia feminista de la literatura española [‘A Short Feminist History of Spanish Literature’] as one of the greatest challenges in creating a feminist history of literature: the “demystifying and decentralising agenda that aspires to recognize the conflict of discourses (and future projects) of cultural texts”. Starting from this premise, Raquel is developing an understanding of the anthology as a cultural object of crucial importance for the circulation of poetic works and the proliferation of certain auto/representations of women’s writing. Anthologies are not a mere compilation of texts, she argues, but rather new works that derive from the reading and rewriting of the works that comprise them. By reconsidering anthologies in this way in her project, Raquel draws our attention to the individual subjectivities of reading processes that become instruments used by certain individuals to mould and define culture. She explores the implications of interpretative practices in contemporary cultures from a gender perspective, questioning deeply rooted assumptions about value and authenticity. 

Image of Carmen Conde’s ‘Poesía femenina española viviente’

During Raquel’s stay in Oxford, we organised an online lecture on networks of women writers in Francoist Spain (we are indebted to Digna Martinez-Sabaris for saving the day with the technology!) and made the most of a quieter time in the academic year to get together with fellow early career researchers in the Spanish Sub-Faculty over post-work drinks. We had the chance to meet and discuss our respective projects and shared interests on several occasions, and to set up future opportunities to collaborate, on Raquel’s proposed monographic special issue on problems of gender, authority and legitimisation under Franco, and on a related seminar at the University of Alcalá, where Raquel will shortly take up a postdoctoral fellowship. We are extremely grateful to the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland for this opportunity, and to everyone in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages who facilitated the research stay. The early career researcher journey is a busy, challenging, and often turbulent one, and this chance to connect with someone in a similar position, to bounce ideas back and forth and join forces on future projects, has given us both a real boost ahead of the new academic year.