No hay nación para este sexo: la Re(d)pública transatlántica de las Letras: escritoras españolas y latino-americanas (1824–1936) ed. by Pura Fernández

Abstract

Reviewed by: No hay nación para este sexo: la Re(d)pública transatlántica de las Letras: escritoras españolas y latino-americanas (1824–1936) ed. by Pura Fernández Ronald Briggs TK Pura Fernández, editor. No hay nación para este sexo: la Re(d)pública transatlántica de las Letras: escritoras españolas y latino-americanas (1824–1936). Iberoamericana, 2015, 396 pp. Pura Fernández's new anthology focuses on the women who participated in what Habermas might call the public sphere in the Spanish-speaking world between the end of the Spanish American Wars of Independence and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Attuned in equal measure to the degree of agency afforded by the world of letters and the limits placed on that world by economic and political forces beyond its control, the group of 16 essayists assembled here provides an eloquent and well-researched series of investigations into the web of international and transatlantic literary networks that sustained women writers in Spain and Spanish America. Fernández's forcefully written and historically grounded introduction makes clear what is at stake in the project: not just the recovery of unjustly marginalized figures, but the advancement of a networkcentered approach to researching them that takes into account the influence of personal and official relationships on individual texts and careers. It is no accident that the time period covered by this collection roughly corresponds to the development of national literary histories and canons in the Spanish American republics. These histories have tended to serve as vehicles of oblivion and recovery—select clubs from which writers can be exiled and into which they can be rescued. Fernández's collection takes seriously the attempts of women in the Spanish-speaking world to create international networks that would serve as a counter-structure to the national ones that so often excluded them. This network-based approach is not without precedents, and Fernández's introduction acknowledges, among many other precursors, Francesca Denegri's work on Peruvian women intellectuals in the late nineteenth century and Leona S. Martin's 2004 article, "Nation Building, International Travel, and the Construction of the Nineteenth-Century Pan-Hispanic Women's Network." Going beyond the question of oblivion and recovery, Fernández also cites Lynn Hunt's articulation of New Cultural History as a guiding principle, underlining the need to focus on the structures that shape the production of texts. Aesthetics matters, too, in Fernández's analysis, and her introduction takes care to point out the intersections between the practical forces governing publication and distribution and the defining qualities of the literary: what artistic genius means and what sort of reaction a writer should seek to produce in her readers. She argues that the practical and the aesthetic did not exist in parallel isolation and that the notions of literary genius and objectivity developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to put women writers at a disadvantage. [End Page 246] The breadth of the collection—16 essays and a substantial introduction covering three continents and two hemispheres—makes it difficult to summarize. Since it would be impossible to discuss every essay in detail, I will offer some reflections on a sampling that reflect the overall high quality of scholarship on display throughout. The collection's geographical and temporal breadth extends to genres of cultural production, too, as the works under consideration range from William Acree's appraisal of the hand-woven divisas carried by nineteenth-century soldiers in Río de la Plata to the role of women writers in the 1910 celebration of the centennial of the Revolución de Mayo analyzed by Javier Lluch-Prats. Networking and its practical and aesthetic implications take center stage in essays by Noël Valis, Akiko Tsuchiya, and María Nelly Goswitz that deal, respectively, with mentorship among romantic writers in Spain and the US, the influence of gender and anti-slavery organizations in the writings of Faustino Sáez de Melgar, and the legacy of real and virtual literary salons. These studies use archival and published materials to reconstruct the literary communities in question and the concrete role they played...