The romance novel and popular culture during the early Franco regime in Spain: towards the construction of other discourses of femininity

• Published in: Journal of gender studies Vol. 17; no. 3; pp. 225 - 236
• Main Author: Puente, Sonia Núñez
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Taylor & Francis Group 01.09.2008; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: de Icaza, Carmen; Dictatorship; Discourse; Femininity; femininity rewritten; Fiction; Franco's regime; Franco, Francisco (1892-1975); Imagination; Intimacy; Literary criticism; Literary history; Love; moderate modernity; Modernism; Modernity; Novels; Parameters; Popular Culture; Popular literature; popular novel; Romance languages; Sociology of culture; Spain; Spanish language; stereotype subversion; Stereotypes; Womens studies
• ISSN: 0958-9236; 1465-3869
• DOI: 10.1080/09589230802204258

In this paper, my intention is to show and analyse the boom of the romantic novel - given the theoretical assumptions of popular cultural studies - in the Spanish literary scene during the first years of Franco's regime with two novels by Carmen de Icaza. The starting point is the hypothesis that the romantic novel, even if it keeps some elements belonging to the prevailing social speech of those days, also represents a subtle break from the distinctive parameters of femininity created by Franco's regime. The relevance of my proposal is that, if the romantic novel, on the one hand, fits the distinctive parameters of femininity such as passivity or those feminine standards such as love or sentimentalism, on the other it subverts its discourse of origin when it undermines the pillars of the patriarchal society with the subversive power of the impassioned imagination which, in the romantic novels analysed, is converted into an alternative reality.