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This essay explores several Emancipation-era novels reflecting the prevalence of the cross-cultural exchanges that defined Caribbean life at mid-nineteenth century, processes that are not readily apparent when looking at the region’s fiction through the lens of discrete anglophone, francophone, or hispanophone literary studies. Despite their different linguistic and cultural orientations, novelists like E. L. Joseph, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Juan José Nieto share an engagement with issues and themes that continue to define Caribbean literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Thus, even as the conditions of each novel’s production are unique – whether created by a Cuban-born abolitionist writing of her native island from Spain (Avellaneda), or by an affiliate of Trinidad’s post-Emancipation planter class (Joseph), or by a political refugee from Colombia (Nieto) – they all exhibit a self-reflexive concept of caribeñidad or Caribbeanness. In so doing they also mark a point when the novel of the Caribbean became the Caribbean novel.
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.
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