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Abstract

In her paper "His/tory and Its Vicissitudes in Álvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale" Luz Angélica Kirschner argues that in Julia Álvarez's In the Time of the Bautterflies and in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, although with certain limitations and differences in their approaches, in a complementary way, their texts exemplify, as Joan Wallace Scott suggested, the need to consider gender "a useful category of historical analysis" to overturn the monological and well-organized version of official history that, in the process of history writing, has tended to obliterate "insignificant" narratives and voices. At the same time, Kirschner shows that these authors problematize existing historical paradigms, practices, and assumptions not in order to set another type of myth or monologue in its place, but rather, to create a space of indeterminacy that allows the negotiation of human history. Kirschner proposes that Atwood and Álvarez create in/with their texts an open space where it is not enough to recover the female subject and render her visible in history, but where it is imperative to critically analyze the specificity of women's experiences and to interpret them in more complex and multiple-layered ways.

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