This book offers an appealing blend of history and literary criticism, with the added benefit of an important focus on women and gender, a theme long neglected in studies of South American Independence. The authors, literary critics with a firm grounding in history and political theory, provide an excellent source for both specialists and non-specialists interested in the evolution, merging, and clash of ideas around independence, liberty, and citizenship in the first post-colonial decades in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries of South America.

The book is organised into two parts. Part One casts a fresh eye on the writings of the ‘big men’ of South American political letters in the era of independence: Bolivar, Bello and Echeverría. Part Two looks closely at women writers and women's literary culture in this period. The book's nine topically focused chapters put emphasis on Spanish-speaking South America, although one chapter concentrates exclusively on Brazil, a country also considered in the introductory and concluding chapters.

While a current trend in some fields is towards the increased integration of women into the exploration of larger themes, the introductory chapter of South American Independence: Gender, Politics and Text argues convincingly that it still makes sense to look at them separately, because of the extent to which their role in letters and politics has been erased. In addition to excavating the work of women writers previously recognised (if ignored or silenced) in their own time, and later dropped from the record, the authors want to delve deeper into the gender dynamics of the period, to explore ‘the interplay between gender culture and political culture at all levels of the body politic’ (p. 18). Distilling the goal of the book, the authors tell us that ‘this book is a literary and historical study, which examines some of the ideas and activities of the men and women who contributed to the making of public culture and yet, in the case of women, were largely excluded from it. At issue is how gender shaped and was shaped by the political discourses of the independence period’ (p. 4). The introductory chapter also provides a useful overview of the main course of South American independence, covering political, military and intellectual events; this section is followed by a discussion of the three main concepts driving the authors' analysis. In a short section describing the concept ‘liberty’, they put into context the evolving concepts of natural rights, liberty, citizenship and property ownership. A section on the concept ‘gender’ summarises the now commonly recognised ‘problem’ of women in discussions of rights and in political theory in general. Next, ‘text’ is invoked to explain the importance of letters in the independence era, existing and overlapping as they did with militarism and the law. Finally, the introduction describes the divergent path followed by Brazilian independence, along with the different opportunities and dead-ends for women of letters in nineteenth-century Brazil.

The book then proceeds to analyse, in five chapters, judiciously selected aspects of ‘the textual constructions of gender categories’ (p. 4) in independence-era writings in Venezuela, Argentina and Peru. The authors first give attention to Simon Bolivar's gender symbolism as well as the ways in which he addressed real women in his writing. The next two chapters address the work of Andrés Bello and Esteban Echeverría, demonstrating that each man, in his own way, painted portraits of society with ‘no space for women’ (p. 73). The final chapter of Part One looks topically at woman as a symbol in satires, focusing on publications from Lima. This chapter traces some of the dominant tropes in this literature: women as grotesque, or as symbols of chaos. It also brings in as counterpoint some of the sharp responses by literate women at the time.

Part Two begins by providing a condensed grounding in the historical context of Spanish independence struggles, along with women's roles (long overlooked by scholars) in rebellion and war as well as their attempts to influence postcolonial laws in their favour. Next, the authors turn to four thematic studies of women's writings. First, a chapter on women and writing in Chile, including the literary products of tertulias, or literary circles, and women's correspondence, demonstrates their level of social and political engagement ‘despite efforts to restrict their education to domestic roles’ (p. 164). The following chapter looks at the writing of two major women writers of the period, Josefa Acevedo of Colombia and Mercedes Marin of Chile, both of whom attempted to carve out space for women as important contributors to the nation. Next, a chapter on Brazil focuses on female writers' ideas about women's agency in politics and nation in the context of (in contrast to Spanish America) the murky coexistence of both monarchist and republican camps. The final chapter examines the Argentine writer Juana Manso, whose outspoken views on women's rights resulted in marginalisation in her time, and thereby serves to bring Manso back from that exile.

In addition to the interesting and insightful reading provided by these chapters, some overall advantages of this book include its uniting of textual analysis of the ‘big’ (male) writers of South American independence, along with the less-studied work of women of the era. Similarly, the joining of historical and literary methods and material (with a healthy splash of feminist theory) makes the book a rounded study of the subject. The inclusion of both gender analysis and a focus on women brings a methodological sophistication to the book; however, this reader would have liked to see some discussion of the construction of masculinity as well. Another issue is the relatively sparse material on Brazil. These minor shortcomings should not, however, detract from the overall usefulness of this volume. It could be used successfully in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in history, literature, and Latin American studies. And it goes without saying that for scholars of the independence era it is an important addition to bibliographies and bookshelves.