Spanish Literature Commons^™

Constructions Of Domesticity In Nineteenth-Century Spanish America, Lee Joan Skinner

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

It is by now a commonplace that in nineteenth-century Spanish American literature the family serves as a metaphor for the nation and that authors express their political agendas through allegories of courtship and marriage. In such readings, potential love matches symbolize the reconciliation of contesting political or ethnic groups and point toward ways for the newly-formed Spanish American nations to negotiate difference without falling into civil war. Most notably, Doris Sommer's Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America succinctly explains her project-subsequently taken up and adapted by a generation of critics-as one that wishes "to locate an erotics of …