Gender, literature and national identity: Political and cultural discourses in Galician proto-nationalism

Abstract

During the Spanish Isabeline period (1843-1868) female intellectual authorship undergoes a process of oficialization that triggers in Galicia the political appropriation of that same literary subjectivity through which proto-nationalist ideals are articulated. During the decade of the sixties, owing to Manuel Murguía’s pro-Galician liberal discourse, the significant “Galician woman” becomes the symbolic repository of the differentiation between Galician and Spanish traditions. It is then when women’s writing grows to be an inherent part of the emergent Galician literary system.