Poetry was part of the common sound space, ranging from grand odes to heroes to popular songs about bandits or gauchos. The recitation of a poem, often composed solely for the occasion, accompanied most public events, and later in the century learning to recite poetry well was considered part of a good education. Poems from the ancient Spanish romancero were alive and well then in Spanish America, as Portuguese traditional poetry was in Brazil. Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda is the brightest star in the nineteenth century's female poetic firmament and, until the appearance of Ruben Dario in the 1880s, is perhaps only rivaled in the lyric by her earlier compatriot, Jose Maria de Heredia. With the expansion of public education, especially the normalista movement in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and other countries, young people, both men and women, from modest beginnings entered the literary sphere.

The literature of the nineteenth-century Americas, considered both north and south, reveals a textured landscape of sensory material captured by the bodies of women. From the River Plate to Caribbean cities, this is revealed in the feminine cultural production not only in nation building narratives, but also in pamphlets, newspapers, and manuals registering female experience, situating women's sensory reach at the center of discussion. This chapter focuses on two mid-century romantics Argentina's, Juana Manuela Gorriti and Cuba's Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, who take experience to be central to their writing, positioning sense and sensibility as essential for citizen engagement. The insistence on sensual experience is more than a path to explore women's interiority. The chapter describes a claim that individual perceptions, and a trust in the sentient being, work as part of a larger project both to define the bases of governabilty and to expose its shortcomings and flaws.

This chapter briefly explores the rich tradition of literature written and published by women in the Spanish Antilles, Cuba and Puerto Rico, in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. It focuses on the ways these women engaged with their countries' distinctive island identities from a political and gendered perspective within the broader framework of the Hispanic literary and cultural tradition. The genre most cultivated by women was poetry, although the most celebrated woman writer of the period, the Cuban Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, was acclaimed as a dramatist as well as a poet, and wrote novels and an autobiography. The Spanish Constitution of 1837 guaranteed freedom of the press, and it was during the progressive General Espartero's regency that Avellaneda's novel, Sab, and her first book of poems, Poesias, were published. Sab remains exceptionally transgressive for its times.

By and large texts written by women offer an alternative stance, a diff erentiated locus that places their writing in dialogue with a dominantly patriarchal tradition. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in Mexico, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda in Cuba, and Clorinda Matto de Turner in Peru are among the renowned pioneering women whose writings embodied suppressed claims of their times. Taking this tradition of emancipated women writers in Latin America as the starting point of a rich and dynamic literary trajectory, this chapter aims to provide an overview of women's writing in the Andean area. The Andean region highlighted in the chapter is taken as a physical, as well as a symbolic, territory that has had an impact, in the past and present, on both its peoples and its social and cultural processes. While this panoramic approach takes a historical perspective, it places emphasis on present-day trends and writers.