The Biographical Strategy. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Carolina Coronado, "Románticas" after Romanticism

Abstract

This essay explores the possibilities opened by the so-called “new biography” as an extraordinarily useful analytical and narrative strategy, not only to explain the making of modern subjectivity, but, also, to illuminate broader historical problems and periods. First, it presents the historiographical contexts in which the so called “return of the subject” took place in the midst of the debates between social history and the new cultural history, which tended to consolidate a certain cultural determinism in which the idea of subjectivity itself, paradoxically, was deeply questioned. The “new biography,” as it consolidated during the last decades of the twentieth century, not only emerged through analytical tensions affecting the relationship between individual and society, action and structure or text and context, but, also, dealing with the very possibility of reconstructing historical subjects behind the texts and discursive structures. Second, I analyze the life and works of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Carolina Coronado precisely, to illustrate the possibilities offered by biography, not only to scrutinize the complex dynamics within which (female) subjectivity is historically constructed, but, also, to question traditional historical narratives.