The three women focused upon here, acting as agents in history, work
against the impoverished roles scripted for them as prote(c)toras of the
private. Three Latin American women -- Lúcia Miguel Pereira, Victoria
Ocampo, and Gabriela Mistral -- chose the act of writing as a way to inter-
vene in the public realm of literary criticism being developed in the first half
of the twentieth century. Their work provides a body of critical writing -- at
times resistant, at others acquiescent -- that not only comments upon the
development of literary production but also reveals the difficulties women
encounter in claiming a public voice in Latin America. The discursive strat-
egies their works employ are multiple and range from the extension of the
personal beyond its customary gendered limits to careful mimicry of nation-
alist discourses on culture to the formation of a women's nationalist project
distinct from (at times critical of) traditional nationalism. By spotlighting
their work, this book examines both the possibilities of women's engage-
ment with critical discourse and the status of woman as a historical subject
in Latin America. It thus scrutinizes the ways in which cultural concerns are
articulated within a highly gendered Latin American context.

The ideas presented in the following chapters arise from an initial obser-
vation about Brazilian literary history. In studies of nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century Brazilian literature, citations of the literary critical work
of Lúcia Miguel Pereira ( 1901-1959) appear with considerable frequency.
A novelist, Miguel Pereira was the only recognized female literary critic of
her time in Brazil. As a woman, what is it about her writing that allows her
to successfully claim authority and make critical judgments about litera-
ture? Moreover, at what cost was she able to adopt a critical position nor-
mally available only to men? An examination of her writings reveals a sharp
contrast between the concerns voiced in her literary criticism and the themes

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