Latin American Women Dramatists

Contributors discuss the works of 15 Latin American playwrights and delineate the artistic lives of these women dramatists. The playwrights from countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela all highlight the problems inherent in writing under politically repressive governments. They also illustrate through the writer's experiences that gender difference entails both loss and profit. A theme common to all the playwrights is that their plays - whether they subscribe to traditional male forms of writing or are involved in dismantling masculine structures - use the theater to bring about change. Catherine Larson, Associate Professor of Spanish and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Indiana University, is the author of Language and Comedia: Theory and Practice and numerous other articles on the theater of Golden Age Spain and 20th-century Latin America; and co-editor of Brave New Worlds: Studies in Spanish Golden Age Literature. Margarita Vargas, Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is co-translator of The House on the Beach and co-editor of Women Writing Women: An Anthology of Spanish American Theater of the 1980s. She has also published critical essays on Mexican literature and Spanish-American theater.