Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism

"Blood Novels provides urgently needed and theoretically nuanced arguments about gender and the body in nineteenth-century narrative. Chang’s strikingly original study shows the centrality of blood, both symbolic and material, to Spanish culture."

Lisa Surwillo, Associate Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University

"A highly original work of scholarship, Blood Novels illuminates the gendered cultural significance of blood – in both its material and its discursive dimensions – as a major structuring element in the works of male Spanish realist writers. Drawing on feminist materialism that attends to the embodied experiences of women, Chang brilliantly analyses these novelists’ obsession with women’s bloodlines and bleeding bodies, showing how these representations are intertwined with sexual and racial discourses. As the first scholarly monograph to address the cultural politics of blood in nineteenth-century Spain, Blood Novels represents a major contribution to the fields of Iberian gender and cultural studies."

Akiko Tsuchiya, Professor of Spanish, Washington University in St. Louis

"Combining theoretical sophistication, rigorous historicization, and meticulous close reading, Julia H. Chang’s study shows the association of blood with the female body to be a masculinist obsession underpinning the work of Spain’s male realist novelists. Her argument that the nineteenth century did not replace early modern concerns with blood with a new concern with sex, but that the two concerns coexisted uneasily, is compelling."

Jo Labanyi, Professor Emerita of Spanish, New York University