Title: The Shattered Mirror
Description: Popular images of women in Mexico - conveyed through literature and, more recently, film and television - were long restricted to either the stereotypically submissive wife and mother or the demonized fallen woman. But new representations of women and their roles in Mexican society have shattered the ideological mirrors that reflected these images. This book explores this major change in the literary representation of women in Mexico.

Maria Elena de Valdes enters into a selective examination of literary representation in its social context and a contestatory engagement of both the literary text and its place in the social reality of Mexico.

Some of the topics she considers are Carlos Fuentes and the subversion of the social codes for women; the poetic ties between Sor Juana Ines de la Crus and Octavio Paz; questions of female identity in the writings of Rosario Castellanos, Luisa Josefina Hernandez, Maria Luisa Puga, and Elena Poniatowska; the Chicana writing of Sandra Cisneros; and the postmodern celebration - without reprobation - of being a woman in Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate.
Subjects: Mexican literature, Women authors, Mexican American authors, History and criticism, American literature, Women in literature, Mexican American women, Intellectual life, Mexican Americans in literature, Women and literature, History, Mexican literature, women authors, Mexican literature, history and criticism, American literature, mexican american authors, American literature, women authors, American literature, history and criticism, 20th century