Women Who Leave: Uprooting and Return in Galician Literature

Abstract

The article considers the literary treatment of emigration in Galician fiction, through a review of the most recent work in the field. It looks in particular at the role of women (both authors and characters) and relates approaches here to the changes that have arisen as a result of Galician migratory flows over recent decades. It seeks to show how narrative fiction, a genre highly sensitive to social change, has the capacity to identify phenomena still barely visible in statistical accounts, and to act as a space for the re-signification of new individual and collective identities that are currently emerging within the context of globalization, thus contributing to the opening up of new possibilities relating to the kind of society that we want to become in the future.