Embodying Resistance: Griselda Gambaro and the Grotesque

Embodying Resistance traces narrative strategies in Griselda Gambaro’s novels to the grotesco criollo and to the broader grotesque tradition. Gambaro (Argentina, 1928 - ) is widely recognized as an interpreter of a society in crisis. This first full-length study of all but one of her major narrative publications provides a coherent theoretical framework and clear historical and social referents. After an overview of grotesque and grotesco criollo as literary technique and effect through a summary of pertinent critical theory, these techniques and their effect on the reader are analyzed in six novels, with an emphasis on their critique of social relationships within the Argentine political system and within male-female relationships. This book will be helpful to both the literary scholar and the undergraduate or graduate student and should be read by those interested in contemporary women’s writing, oppositional voices under repression, in the political import of art, and in Latin American history and culture.