ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book begins with two primary critical interests: first the Bildungsroman as a genre of literature whose gender-based theoretical delineation has both echoed, and threatened to exacerbate, a parallel restriction of self-definition on the part of women, but which offers nonetheless an extremely pertinent framework for Spanish American women's writing. The second, correlative interest, was a curiosity about the ways in which disparate texts from within the broad field of Spanish American women's writing engage with the genre's central narrative concern. Peri Rossi has her character Graciela travel to Africa to write a report on Female Genital Mutilation. Ultimately, alongside the stories they relate, the novels studied here also tell us much about what Spanish American literary feminism has achieved, needs to achieve, and can achieve by continuing to out bridges of words into the uncharted future.
