molinaro
Professor Emeritus
Spanish and Portuguese

Research Areas

Contemporary Peninsular Literature, Culture, Film; Literary Theory; Hispanic Women's Literature; Feminist Theory; Post-War Peninsular Novel; 20th Century Latin American literature

Scholarly Books

  • Spanish and Latin American Women’s Crime Fiction in the New Millennium: From Noir to Gris, co-edited with Nancy Vosburg. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2017. 

  • ​Policing Gender and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Crime Fiction. Burlington, VT and Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015. 

     Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s popular crime series, written in Spanish and organized around the exploits of Police Inspector Petra Delicado and Deputy Inspector Fermín Garzón, is arguably the most successful detective series published in Spain since 1980. Policing Gender examines the tensions between the rhetoric of gender differences espoused by the woman detective and the orthodox ideology of the police procedural: even as Giménez Bartlett’s series incorporates gender differences into the crime fiction formula, it does so in order to correct women, naturalize men’s authority, sanction social hierarchies, and assuage collective anxieties. With the exception of the protagonist, the women characters require constant surveillance and modification, often as the result of men’s supposedly innate protectiveness and/or excessive sexuality. Men, by contrast, circulate more freely in the fictional world and are intrinsic to the political, psychological, and economic prosperity of their communities. The volume includes analyses of the nine installments that currently make up the Petra Delicado series, as well as engaging contemporary cultural theories of gender.

  • Esther Tusquets: Scholarly Correspondences, co-edited with Inmaculada Pertusa Seva. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. 
  • Foucault, Feminism, and Power: Reading Esther Tusquets. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1991.

 

Selected Articles

  • “Resisting Victims and Susana Hernández’s Crime Fiction.” Profaned Bodies: Essays on the Victim in Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction. Ed. Renée Craig-Odders. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland P. Forthcoming.
  • "Dwarves, Bullfighters, and Other Disenchanted Masculinities in Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves.” The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture. Eds. Lorraine Ryan and Ana Corbalán. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017. 113-26.
  • “Aparecerse siempre (no) es aparecerse: Ventura Pons, Sergi Belbel, y los fantasmas de Morir.” Ventura Pons: Una mirada excepcional desde el cine catalán. Eds. Conxita Domènech and Andrés Lema-Hincapié. Madrid and Frankfurt: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 2015. 115-33.
  • “The Art of Time: Levinasian Alterity and the Contemporary Spanish Novel.” Levinas and Twentieth-Century Literature: Ethics and the Reconstruction of Subjectivity. Ed. Donald R. Wehrs. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2013. 255-77.
  • “(Re)Solving Castration Anxiety and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Mensajeros de la oscuridad.” Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica 28 (2012): 131-47. 
  • “Looking for the Other: Peninsular Women’s Fiction after Levinas.” Women in the Spanish Novel Today: Essays on the Reflection of Self in the Works of Three Generations. Eds. Kyra Kietrys and Montserrat Linares. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland P, 2009. 133-51.   
  • “Narrating Women in the Post-war Spanish Novel.” A Companion to the Twentieth-Century Spanish Novel. Ed. Marta E. Altisent. Suffolk: Tamesis P, 2008. 161-73.
  • “Watching, Wanting and the Gen X Soundtrack of Gabriela Bustelo’s Veo Veo.” Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film, and Rock Culture. Eds. Christine Henseler and Randolph D. Pope. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2007. 203-15.
  • "To Be and Not to Be (Feminist): The Curious Epistemology of Alicia Giménez Bartlett's Petra Petra Delicado Series." Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Detective Fiction: Essays on the Género Negro Tradition. Eds. Renée Craig-Odders, Jacqueline Collins, and Glen S. Close. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
  • "Facing Toward Alterity and Spain's 'Other' New Novelists." Anales de la literatura española contemporánea 30.1-2 (2005): 301-24.