The career of Spain's celebrated author Carmen Martin Gaite spanned the Spanish Civil War, Franco's dictatorship, and the nation's transition to democracy. She wrote fiction, poetry, drama, screenplays for television and film, and books of literary and cultural analysis. The only person to win Spain's National Prize for Literature (Premio Nacional de las Letras) twice, Martin Gaite explored and blended a range of genres, from social realism to the fantastic, as she took up issues of gender, class, economics, and aesthetics in a time of political upheaval. Part 1 ("Materials") of this volume provides resources for instructors and a literary-historical chronology. The essays in part 2 ("Approaches") consider Martin Gaite's bestknown novel, The Back Room (El cuarto de atras), and other works from various perspectives: narratological, feminist, sociocultural, stylistic. In an appendix, the volume editor, who was a friend of the author, provides a new translation of Martin Gaite's only autobiographical sketch, alongside the original Spanish.
Joan L. Brown is Elias Ahuja Professor of Spanish at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Secrets from the Back Room: The Fiction of Carmen Martin Gaite (1987) and Confronting Our Canons: Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2010). She is the editor of Women Writers of Contemporary Spain: Exiles in the Homeland (1991). With Carmen Martin Gaite, she wrote the textbook Conversaciones creadoras: Mastering Spanish Conversation (1994).
"This is an excellent and welcome book, written with care by a diverse group of scholars. The inclusion of Carmen Martin Gaite's only autobiography brings the reader closer to the author's voice. Readers will find many innovative teaching techniques and activities to enhance the learning experience for students; the reviews of Martin Gaite's works and of the critical studies on her will broaden the professor's understanding, and the time line of Spanish history is thorough and helpful." --Catherine G. Bellver, University of Nevada, Las Vegas "Carmen Martin Gaite is one of the most important Spanish writers of the twentieth century. The diversity and complexity of her work, which includes fiction, essays, children's literature, poetry, and drama, call for a road map, and this volume definitely provides one." --Nuria Cruz-Camara, University of Tennessee "Carmen Martin Gaite is one of the most important Spanish writers of the twentieth century. The diversity and complexity of her work, which includes fiction, essays, children's literature, poetry, and drama, call for a road map, and this volume definitely provides one." --Nuria Cruz-Camara, University of Tennessee
