Moving Reflections: Gender, Faith and Aesthetics in the Work of Angela Figuera Aymerich

Angela Figuera Aymerich (1902-84) remains an obscure figure among the Spanish social poets of the Franco regime, her work almost entirely eclipsed by male contemporaries. This book attempts both to bring her poetry to the attention of a wider audience and to show how her work anticipates the generation of women writers and poets who have emerged since the coming of democracy. Focusing primarily on a selection of poems published between 1948 and 1962, Dr Evans shows how her work has been mistakenly ignored as maternal in essence and so of little interest to the poetry of social protest in general. Using feminist and psychoanalytical theories of language to suggest that identity (and poetic identity in particular) is constructed as the effect of mirror images, the author argues that the `moving reflections' of gender, faith and aesthetics mirror Figuera's struggle with a fragmented poetic identity; through these concepts her work can be read not only as a `moving reflection' of maternal femininity and social injustice, but as an active attempt to retrace the boundaries of female identity. JO EVANS teaches in the Department of Hispanic Studies, Edinburgh University.