The Romance Novel and Popular Culture during the Early Franco Regime in Spain: Towards the Construction of Other Discourses of Femininity

Here's the abstract:

In this paper, my intention is to show and analyse the boom of the romantic novel – given the theoretical assumptions of popular cultural studies – in the Spanish literary scene during the first years of Franco's regime with two novels by Carmen de Icaza. The starting point is the hypothesis that the romantic novel, even if it keeps some elements belonging to the prevailing social speech of those days, also represents a subtle break from the distinctive parameters of femininity created by Franco's regime. The relevance of my proposal is that, if the romantic novel, on the one hand, fits the distinctive parameters of femininity such as passivity or those feminine standards such as love or sentimentalism, on the other it subverts its discourse of origin when it undermines the pillars of the patriarchal society with the subversive power of the impassioned imagination which, in the romantic novels analysed, is converted into an alternative reality.

Since this little snippet isn't one of the main topics of the paper, but is nonetheless interesting, I haven't tagged the paper as dealing with "Publishing" but will just put the quote in here:

During the period between 1940 and 1970, a large number of romance novel collections were published in Spain, with all publishers dedicating one or more collections to this genre. The number of titles and print runs was incredibly high, particularly for some authors. Among these publications, which reflected the predominance of a specific kind of feminine cliché of the time, there were collections of particular relevance such as Esmeralda by the publishers Clı́per, Princesita by Cı́es, Violeta by Molino and Azucena by Toray. (225)