The Production and Circulation of Literature for Women Between Europe and America: A Perspective from the Hispanic-American World

This essay aims to analyse how literature “for women” and the image of the ideal female reader were shaped in the eighteenth century by focusing on relations between Spain and colonial Latin America and comparing them with the situation elsewhere in Europe. The tendency has been to adopt a “national approach” to the study of women as potential readers and moral subjects with little regard for the similarities and differences between disparate geographical spaces. To overcome these limitations, this essay will apply a comparative and transnational perspective. I shall set out a general overview of works addressed to women in Spain and New Spain that were published or translated in the second half of the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the transatlantic circulation of this kind of literature. By drawing on a variety of sources, such as newspaper advertisements and bibliographic catalogues relating to book production in America and Spain, I shall present a dynamic vision of the complex relationship between gender and reading, one that belies any simplistic and increasingly outdated assertions of Hispanic and Iberian backwardness in comparison with the rest of Europe during the Enlightenment.