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The eminent Spanish writer Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921) penned more than six hundred short stories, and this work, Challenge or Surrender?, focusses on the female protagonists of twenty-five of these narratives, selected for their exposition, in one way or another, of Pardo Bazan's feminist views. Each of these stories has provided one or more largely proactive female protagonists who confront personal and contemporaneous societal challenges in their lives. Some rise to overcome a gender-related challenge, while others fail to do so. Every story embodies Pardo Bazan's forcefully expressed disdain for fin de siecle Spain's gendered injustices and challenges at least one of the patriarchal mores of her Spanish society, most notably the Spanish code of honor, the angel del hogar construct, the sexual double standard and el que diran-ubiquitous "neighbourhood gossip".Most of the stories are, as expected, Realist narratives, but there are also examples of naturalist, romantic, gothic, costumbrismo, fantastic, and folletin writing. Pardo Bazan's ability to manipulate the literary styles in her fiction, and her use of narrative techniques, that undermine the portrayal of conventional female behaviour convey, as subtexts, her antipathy towards the gendered inequalities that she recognises in her society. In retrospect, her short stories can now arguably be seen to have been her most effective channel of dissemination for her feminist ideas. Challenge or Surrender? encompasses both the literary and cultural traditions of Spain and, in addition, it references multiple intersections of Spanish literature, culture and arts. With its original analyses of twenty-five Pardo Bazan narratives this publication represents a major addition to the existing corpus of analyses of the author's short stories to date. Patricia Ramsay, Ph.D., Victoria University of Wellington. Dr. Ramsay has an ongoing interest in fin de siecle Spanish literature and, in particular, Emilia Pardo Bazan's short stories.
