{"product_id":"protecting-the-spanish-woman-gender-identity-and-empowerment-in-marza-de-zayass-works-9781647790844","title":"Protecting the Spanish Woman: Gender Identity and Empowerment in María de Zayas's Works","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn important contribution to the study of women writers.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e María de Zayas is unique in the seventeenth century as the only Spanish woman to write a collection of exemplary novels whose quality is often compared to Miguel de Cervantes' masterful works. Her two main collections of short stories, \u003ci\u003eNovelas amorosas y ejemplares\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eDesengaños amorosos\u003c\/i\u003e, encompass a social critique based on literary fiction that exposes flaws in the idealized archetypes of masculine identity in early modern Spain. Zayas's stories redefine women's patriarchal disadvantage as a tool to expose the ways in which early modern Spanish women could be empowered to counteract men's discursive and political authority, which they use to unfairly maintain their own social privilege. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Xabier Granja Ibarreche explores how Zayas defies Spanish hegemony by manipulating and transforming the ideals of courtly masculinity that had been popularized by conduct manuals and the traits they specified for appropriate noble comportment. In doing so, Zayas elaborates a nonofficial discourse throughout plots that subvert patriarchal hierarchies: she rearticulates the existing ideological order to empower women who are no longer willing to remain silent and oppressed by masculine domination after centuries of failing to attain a sufficiently self-sufficient political position to ascend in the social hierarchy. By inverting the male gaze that assumes masculinity as a preeminent identity, Zayas subverts the patriarchal subject\/masculine, object\/feminine order and destabilizes manly superiority as a basic universal reality, thereby empowering and unshackling Spanish women to liberate Iberian culture from the repressive and pernicious future she forebodes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eXabier Granja Ibarreche, PhD, \u003c\/b\u003eis an associate professor of Spanish at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He holds an MA in Hispanic literature and earned his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He specializes in early modern Spain and the incipient stages of the Enlightenment, along with Women as Writers and Gender Studies.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Nevada Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50488072667410,"sku":"9781647790844","price":67.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_2ee082ba-23e6-4a9c-8eb3-3ccb6a5ac117.jpg?v=1730466711","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/protecting-the-spanish-woman-gender-identity-and-empowerment-in-marza-de-zayass-works-9781647790844","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}