Sonia Villegas-López | Huelva University (original) (raw)
Call For Papers by Sonia Villegas-López
Books by Sonia Villegas-López
Articles by Sonia Villegas-López
Atlantis, 2001
Page 1. TELLING WOMEN'S LIVES: VISION AS HISTORICAL REVISION IN THE WORK OF MICHÈLE ... more Page 1. TELLING WOMEN'S LIVES: VISION AS HISTORICAL REVISION IN THE WORK OF MICHÈLE ROBERTS Sonia Villegas López Universidad e Huelva Within the recent trend in postmodern fiction which disavows the ...
By the end of the 17th century, the number of women who become professional writers begins to inc... more By the end of the 17th century, the number of women who become professional writers begins to increase notably. These middle-class women stress in their writings the relevance of topics directly related to female domestic experience, like the conventions of courtship, the politics of marriage, and the family relations. According to Paula Backscheider in Spectacular Politics, these feminine versions constitute a "renegotiation" of women's position in patriarchal society, which brings about a revision of their roles, and therefore, a re-ordering of male ones (Backscheider 83). This is precisely the case of Susanna Centlivre, a prolific playwright whose numerous works stand as points of reference to establish the connection between the theatrical tradition of the Restoration and a new concept of comedy-the "New Comedy"-, which will grow into the 18th century. Centlivre's plays-nineteen in all, dated between 1700 and 1722-are listed as belonging to a transitional period, during which she would recuperate Renaissance and Restoration topics and adapt them to the changing times. In her works, Centlivre always turns to the theme of marriage, and the unfavourable circumstances it involves for women, regarding how it is usually enforced on them, how the situation is seen from the perspective of the implicated subjects, that is, the marriageable daughters themselves, who become commodities in the marriage market; and finally, how marital life is experienced by women living in a state of incarceration and banishment from the world (Frushell 17).
The Secret Staircase is the title given to an installation presented by Caroline Isgar and Michèl... more The Secret Staircase is the title given to an installation presented by Caroline Isgar and Michèle Roberts at the Foundling Museum of London in 2008, and also to the accompanying book, a collection of Isgar's drawings and Roberts's eighteen narrative pieces, meant as a souvenir of the exhibition. Roberts tells the story of a daughter's recollection of her childhood and her life with her mother on the occasion of the latter's approaching death. Each piece is inspired by an object belonging either to the past or to the experience of the mother's confinement in a hospice. Roberts's contribution to the installation constitutes a memory text in its own right, and suggests that writing is the actual trace that can bring the past to life and the means by which the daughter comes to terms with the mother figure.
Book chapters by Sonia Villegas-López
The Female Wits Women and Gender in Restoration Literatura and Culture 2006 Isbn 84 96373 93 2 Pags 207 232, 2006
Generos Extremos Extremos Genericos La Politica Cultural Del Discurso Pronografico 2006 Isbn 84 9828 959 9 Pags 191 210, 2006
Atlantis, 2001
Page 1. TELLING WOMEN'S LIVES: VISION AS HISTORICAL REVISION IN THE WORK OF MICHÈLE ... more Page 1. TELLING WOMEN'S LIVES: VISION AS HISTORICAL REVISION IN THE WORK OF MICHÈLE ROBERTS Sonia Villegas López Universidad e Huelva Within the recent trend in postmodern fiction which disavows the ...
By the end of the 17th century, the number of women who become professional writers begins to inc... more By the end of the 17th century, the number of women who become professional writers begins to increase notably. These middle-class women stress in their writings the relevance of topics directly related to female domestic experience, like the conventions of courtship, the politics of marriage, and the family relations. According to Paula Backscheider in Spectacular Politics, these feminine versions constitute a "renegotiation" of women's position in patriarchal society, which brings about a revision of their roles, and therefore, a re-ordering of male ones (Backscheider 83). This is precisely the case of Susanna Centlivre, a prolific playwright whose numerous works stand as points of reference to establish the connection between the theatrical tradition of the Restoration and a new concept of comedy-the "New Comedy"-, which will grow into the 18th century. Centlivre's plays-nineteen in all, dated between 1700 and 1722-are listed as belonging to a transitional period, during which she would recuperate Renaissance and Restoration topics and adapt them to the changing times. In her works, Centlivre always turns to the theme of marriage, and the unfavourable circumstances it involves for women, regarding how it is usually enforced on them, how the situation is seen from the perspective of the implicated subjects, that is, the marriageable daughters themselves, who become commodities in the marriage market; and finally, how marital life is experienced by women living in a state of incarceration and banishment from the world (Frushell 17).
The Secret Staircase is the title given to an installation presented by Caroline Isgar and Michèl... more The Secret Staircase is the title given to an installation presented by Caroline Isgar and Michèle Roberts at the Foundling Museum of London in 2008, and also to the accompanying book, a collection of Isgar's drawings and Roberts's eighteen narrative pieces, meant as a souvenir of the exhibition. Roberts tells the story of a daughter's recollection of her childhood and her life with her mother on the occasion of the latter's approaching death. Each piece is inspired by an object belonging either to the past or to the experience of the mother's confinement in a hospice. Roberts's contribution to the installation constitutes a memory text in its own right, and suggests that writing is the actual trace that can bring the past to life and the means by which the daughter comes to terms with the mother figure.
The Female Wits Women and Gender in Restoration Literatura and Culture 2006 Isbn 84 96373 93 2 Pags 207 232, 2006
Generos Extremos Extremos Genericos La Politica Cultural Del Discurso Pronografico 2006 Isbn 84 9828 959 9 Pags 191 210, 2006
Sederi Yearbook, 2020
In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel... more In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel writing, Richard Head explored the limits of verisimilitude associated with geographical discourse in his three fictions The Floating Island (1673), The Western Wonder (1674) and O-Brazile (1675). In them he argues in favor of the existence of the mysterious Brazile island and uses the factual discourse of the travel diarist to present a semi-mythical place whose very notion stretches the limits of believability. In line with recent critical interpretations of late seventeenth-century fiction as deceptive, and setting the reading of Head’s narrations in connection with other types of travel writing, I argue that Head’s fictions are a means of testing the readers’ gullibility at a time when the status of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, is subject to debate.
Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, Sep 1, 2022
Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700
Sederi, 2020
In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel... more In line with the method prescribed by members of the Royal Society for natural history and travel writing, Richard Head explored the limits of verisimilitude associated with geographical discourse in his three fictions The Floating Island (1673), The Western Wonder (1674) and O-Brazile (1675). In them he argues in favor of the existence of the mysterious Brazile island and uses the factual discourse of the travel diarist to present a semi-mythical place whose very notion stretches the limits of believability. In line with recent critical interpretations of late seventeenth-century fiction as deceptive, and setting the reading of Head’s narrations in connection with other types of travel writing, I argue that Head’s fictions are a means of testing the readers’ gullibility at a time when the status of prose, both fictional and non-fictional, is subject to debate.
This round table presented the relevance of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies and/in Spain unde... more This round table presented the relevance of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies and/in Spain under the auspices of a funded Network (“Victorian and Neo-Victorian Studies in Spain Network’-VINS-FFI2015-71025-REDT) with several work packages. Our research focuses on the Victorians in an (inter)national context with the aim to synthesise the impact of the Victorians on the shaping of modern and contemporary European society. The members involved, five Spanish researchers from different universities, are linked by their research into (neo-)Victorian studies and its diversity in contemporary society including Victorian predecessors and successors as well as neo-Victorianism. They consider the position of the research in the fields of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies and/in Spain. The members of the round table encouraged the audience to join and contribute to the current debate over the Victorians: How are the Victorians received today? What frameworks are useful in contemporary inter...
espanolThe Secret Staircase es el titulo de la exposicion presentada por Caroline Isgar y Michele... more espanolThe Secret Staircase es el titulo de la exposicion presentada por Caroline Isgar y Michele Roberts en el Foundling Museum de Londres en 2008, y tambien el del libro que la ilustraba, una coleccion de los dibujos de Isgar y dieciocho narraciones breves, proyectados como souvenir de la exposicion. Roberts cuenta los recuerdos de infancia de una hija junto a su madre con ocasion de la inminente muerte de esta. Cada texto se inspira en un objeto que pertenece al pasado o a la experiencia de confinamiento en el hospital. La contribucion de Roberts constituye en si misma un texto de la memoria y sugiere que la escritura es la verdadera huella que devuelve el pasado a la vida y el medio por el cual la hija se reconcilia con la figura materna EnglishThe Secret Staircase is the title given to an installation presented by Caroline Isgar and Michele Roberts at the Foundling Museum of London in 2008, and also to the accompanying book, a collection of Isgar�s drawings and Roberts�s eighte...
El presente libro parte de la teorizacion que desde el feminismo y mas recientemente desde los Es... more El presente libro parte de la teorizacion que desde el feminismo y mas recientemente desde los Estudios de Masculinidad se ha hecho en torno al espacio real/domestico, publico, geografico e imaginado/cuerpo, nacion, artes y como los sujetos han sido insertados o han logrado situarse en el. El volumen se divide en tres grandes secciones (Sex/Gender: Unexplored Regions, Inside Out: From the Private to the Public, y Literary (Un)Common Places), cada una de las cuales se bifurca a su vez en dos apartados. Asi, la primera de las secciones ofrece dos perspectivas, “Feminine/feminist terrirories,” que desmitifica la estratificacion generica del espacio y su asignacion estricta a los sexos e incluye trabajos sobre literatura popular femenina, los nuevos espacios feministas sugeridos por la ciencia ficcion, y la insercion de lo femenino en la realidad postcolonial, la diaspora y las migraciones; y “Geographies of gender,” que muestra la artificialidad de la division de los espacios segun el ...
The critical appraisal of the rise of the novel in English has changed drastically from the publi... more The critical appraisal of the rise of the novel in English has changed drastically from the publication of Ian Watt's homonymous study in 1957. Some thirty years later, one of Watt's disciples, Michael McKeon, suggested a new model to study the origins of the novel as a genuine type of prose fiction which was influenced mainly by Italian, French and Spanish sources, and which began earlier than the texts written by the eighteenth-century 'fathers' of the genre, namely Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. Following McKeon's model built around 'questions of truth' and 'questions of virtue', which nonetheless missed some remarkable (female) precedents of the novel tradition, other critics like Josephine Donovan, Paula Backscheider, Ros Ballaster and Janet Todd, among others, have been in charge of rescuing these texts, claiming their influence in the development of the genre. To illustrate their critical approach, and to stress the relationship between former and foreign sources and the incipient-and autochthonous-form of the novel in the late seventeenth century, I will use some examples extracted from Behn's fiction.
La escuela y la educación en valores 1 Preferimos utilizar ese calificativo en lugar del eufemism... more La escuela y la educación en valores 1 Preferimos utilizar ese calificativo en lugar del eufemismo: "fenómeno" que generalmente se utiliza, por las graves consecuencias que tiene para las personas y el medio en el que viven y que van desde la feminización de la pobreza a la emigración y la explotación del suelo salvaje. 3 21 La educación en valores: construir la ciudadanía
Neo-Victorian Biofiction, 2020
Sederi Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society For English Renaissance Studies, 2003
The Inhumane Cardinal is a work of transition written in the early years of the narrative traditi... more The Inhumane Cardinal is a work of transition written in the early years of the narrative tradition in England. Following the mastery of renown precedents like Aphra Behn, Pix explores the possibilities the new genre offered her, standing on the liminal space between an old-fashioned mode ─ romance and its aristocratic conventions ─ and the new literary and social space opened by the novel, which leaves the elevated topics and audience of romance writing behind. She does so by creating a work of great narrative complexity, characterized by a multiplicity of subplots inserted in the narrative as embedded stories. The main plot deals with Cardinal Antonio Barbarino's lustful plan to obtain young Melora's sexual favours, aided by Donna Olympia, an influential woman in the court of Rome. The seduction episode, which encircles the narrative, is interspersed with a number of romantic stories that are devised to induce Melora into accepting the Cardinal's proposal, whom she believed to be the destitute Duke of Ferrara. All the texts inserted are meant as examples for the too innocent Melora, who is taught by way of romantic love affairs and their happy results to act likewise. She realizes her folly too late, and her story works as a cautionary tale for prospective women readers. The value of Pix's project in this work resides, then, in her peculiar use of the concepts of fiction and truth, as she relates them to different narrative levels, associating the former with the conventions of romance, and the latter ─ the sad events of Melora's 'true' story ─ with those of the novel.
Miscelanea a Journal of English and American Studies, Feb 16, 2013
Mujer Cultura Y Comunicacion Realidades E Imaginarios Ix Simposio Internacional De La Asociacion Andaluza De Semiotica 2001 Isbn 84 89673 84 5 Pags 906 917, 2001
Espacios De Genero 2005 Isbn 84 7898 227 2 Pags 283 300, 2005
Actas Del Xxi Congreso Internacional De a E D E a N Sevilla 18 19 20 Diciembre 1997 1999 Isbn 84 472 0489 8 Pags 425 430, 1999