1 Pre - Modern Heroines for a Postmodern Readership

This paper proposes an examination of recent (published since the late 1960s) editions of nineteenth-century Brazilian and Spanish American novels with a considerable component of romanticism. It focuses upon the way in which editors, translators, preface-writers, and especially illustrators, seek to communicate to current-day readers the significance and worth of novels written under the sway of an earlier esthetic. Both reissues in the original language and English translations, and both scholarly and popular editions, are surveyed. Of foremost interest is the way romantic heroines are presented to a 1970s-1990s audience, who, accustomed to late twentieth-century feminism, may find these characters insipid or dependent. This preliminary inquiry covers selected new editions of four celebrated novels: María (1867), by the Colombian Jorge Isaacs; Iracema (1865), the canonical Brazilian work by José de Alencar; Aves sin nido (1889) by Clorinda Matto de Turner of Peru; and Sab (1841), the Cuban antislavery and women's emancipation novel by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. The first three novels are frequently reprinted; McGrady (13) notes that during its first one hundred years (1867-1967), María appeared in some 150 editions. Sab has been through a number of editions, but it