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Acknowledgements
Abbreviations Used in the Volume
Works by Laura Esquivel
Editor’s Preface
The Essays
Apparatus
Translations into English
Style, notes, and chronology
Using the Works Cited
Elizabeth M. Willingham
A Biography of Laura Esquivel
Linda Ledford-Miller
An Introduction to Esquivel Criticism
Like Water for Chocolate: The novel’s early
critical reception
Like Water for Chocolate: The novel and the critics
Like Water for Chocolate: The film and the critics
The Law of Love
Swift as Desire
Malinche: A Novel
Future directions in Esquivel criticism
Elizabeth M. Willingham
Laura Esquivel’s Mexican Chocolate
Elena Poniatowska Amor
(Translated by Manuel Muñoz and Elizabeth M. Willingham)
El chocolate mexicano de Laura Esquivel
Elena Poniatowska Amor
Patrick Duffey
Crossing Gender Borders: Subversion of Cinematic Melodrama
in Like Water for Chocolate
Patrick Duffey
Unmasked Men: Sex Roles in Like Water for Chocolate
Jeffrey Oxford
The Absence of God and the Presence of Ancestors in Laura
Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate
Stephen Butler Murray
Gendered Spaces, Gendered Knowledge: A Cultural Geography
of Kitchenspace in Central Mexico
Maria Elisa Christie
Transformation, Code, and Mimesis: Healing the Family in Like
Water for Chocolate
Debra D. Andrist~
Cultural Identity and the Cosmos: Laura Esquivel’s Predictions
for a New Millennium in The Law of Love
Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez
Laura Esquivel’s Quantum Leap in The Law of Love
Lydia H. Rodríguez
(Translated by Lydia H. Rodriguez)
The Two Mexicos of Swift as Desire
Elizabeth M. Willingham
Malinche: Fleshing out the Foundational Fictions of the Conquest
of Mexico
Jeanne L. Gillespie
Esquivel’s Malinalli: Refusing the Last Word on La
Malinche
Ryan F. Long
Esquivel’s Fiction in the Context of Latin American
Women’s Writing
Alberto Julián Pérez
(Translated by Patrick Duffey and Harrison L. Parks)
Glossary of Spanish and Nahuatl Words and Phrases
The Cover Image: Frida Kahlo 1932
Notes on Contributors
Works Cited
Primary and Secondary Literary and Critical Sources
Films Cited
Film Reviews and Box Office Reports
Television Programming
Resources in Medical Humanities
Index
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“This
collection of essays on the work of celebrated Mexican writer Laura
Esquivel provides a broad overview of her literary and cinematic
production and suggests new approaches for analysis of her work.
The introduction provides a detailed summary of existing scholarly
investigations and will be especially useful to researchers. Suggestions
for future directions in Esquivel criticism reflect contributors’
diverse fields. Essays highlight, for example, the retelling of
Mexican and women’s history through the optic of a past linked
always to the present; women’s critical role in the survival
of communities through food preparation, knowledge of ecology, and
natural healing; character traits when gender roles are reversed;
tension between Catholic traditions and indigenous spirituality;
women’s confrontations with collective and individual trauma;
and the importance of knowledge production located in female-gendered
domestic spaces responsible for familial, community, and national
cohesiveness (the last a particularly understudied subject). In
contrast to the volume’s celebration of Esquivel’s achievement
is its final essay, “Esquivel’s Fiction in the Context
of Latin American Women’s Writing,” in which the author
deviates from the essay’s implicit goal by expressing his
own discomfort with feminism in general and Esquivel’s rewriting
of gender roles in particular. Summing Up: Recommended.” Choice |
