Fe/Male Friends

Staging Gender and Friendship in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature

Claudia Gronemann and Agnieszka Komorowska (eds.).

Although the traditions of philia and amicitia proclaim friendship as a universal concept, it has been an androcentric model until the emergence of the female friend in the Age of Enlightenment. This book analyzes the discursive turn from premodern to modern gendered constructions of friends in Spanish literature and sheds light on specific models of male, female, and mixed relationships in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Our approach reveals the gendering of male friendship through the exclusion of women and shows the crucial moment when women appear capable of true friendship. The study traces the process of transition from a homosocial bond based on a feudal notion of honor in the Siglo de Oro to new forms of affective relations in a proto-bourgeois society that promotes equality, reason and citizenship.
This book spans two centuries of friendship and scrutinizes the creation of specifically gendered social bonds in literary and theoretical frameworks ranging from political writing to poetry, and from the working classes to the intellectual elites. Through novellas, novels, plays, poems, moral weeklies, and letters by female and male authors, every chapter examines a specific concept of fe/male friends related to society, politics, ethics, subjectivity, courtly culture, family and marriage structures. Thus, the book demonstrates the very act of gendering as it relates to friendship as one of the most important forms of social interaction.

Claudia Gronemann is full professor of Romance Literature and Media Studies at the Universität Mannheim. Her research and teaching are focused on French, Francophone, Spanish and Latin American literature and film. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies (Postmoderne, postkoloniale Konzepte der Autobiographie in der französischen und maghrebinischen Literatur, 2002). Her second book is a sound study on gender in Spanish Enlightenment texts (Polyphone Aufklärung: zur Textualität und Performativität der spanischen Geschlechterdebatten im 18. Jahrhundert, 2013). Her main research interests are gender, history of emotions, autobiography/autofiction/authorship, postcolonial theory, as well as film and intermediality.

Agnieszka Komorowska is full professor of Romance Literature at the Universität Kassel. She has written a habilitation thesis on economy, politics, and gender in the representation of friendship in 17th-century Spanish theatre (2021) at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Mannheim. She has completed her Ph.D. in French literature with a book on the poetics of shame in 20th- and 21st-century French literature and thought (published as Scham und Schrift. Strategien literarischer Subjektkonstitution bei Duras, Goldschmidt und Ernaux, 2017). Her research interests include the relationship of economy and literature, the study of affect and emotion in literature and cultural theory as well as visual culture and contemporary literature.

Espacio, género y religión en la literatura del siglo XVIII español / Aenne Gottschalk.

Redes y escritoras ibéricas en la esfera cultural de la primera Edad Moderna / María D. Martos (ed.).

Ofensiva a los oídos piadosos : obscenidad y censura en la poesía española y novohispana del siglo XVIII / Elena Deanda-Camacho.

Casa y espacio doméstico en España y América (siglos XVI-XIX) / Margarita M. Birriel Salcedo, Francisco García González (eds.).