Blood Novels : : Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism / / Julia H. Chang.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: Chang, Julia H.,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Toronto Iberic
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

In the late nineteenth century, Spain’s most prominent writers – Juan Valera, Leopoldo Alas, and Benito Pérez Galdós – made blood a crucial feature of their fiction. Blood Novels examines the cultural and literary significance of blood, unsettling the dominant assumption of the period that blood no longer plays a decisive role in social hierarchies. By examining fictional works through the rubric of "blood novels," Julia H. Chang identifies a shared fascination with blood that probes the limits of realism through blood’s dual nature of matter and metaphor. Situating the literature within broader cultural and theoretical debates, Blood Novels attends to the aesthetic contours of material blood and in particular how bleeding is inflected by gender, caste, and race. Critically engaging with feminist theory, theories of race and whiteness, literary criticism, and medical literature, this innovative study makes a case for treating blood not only as a critical analytic tool that sheds new light on Spanish realism but, more broadly, one that challenges our understanding of gendered and racialized embodiment in Spain.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Realism’s Blood -- Chapter One. The Colour of Blood: Racializing Illegitimacy in Doña Luz -- Chapter Two. From Blood to Flesh: Avowing Material Pleasure in La Regenta -- Chapter Three. Social Blood: The Aesthetics of the Crowd in La desheredada -- Chapter Four. Transfusions: Queering Kinship in Fortunata y Jacinta: Dos historias de casadas -- Coda: The Bleeding Body -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index