With the aim of achieving a more complete representation of the individual and collective contributions of women writers and artists to the cultural landscape of Spain in the 1920s and 1930s, we propose an approach to the general trends of literature written and illustrated by women (literary press, kiosk literature, children’s literature, illustrated poetry books), starting from the analysis of certain expectations related to gender in order to reconstruct the particularities that this literature incorporates.

Literatute written and illustrated by women in Spain will be situated in its European context in order to detect relations of convergence, divergence or influence. Thematic, stylistic or editorial format-related patterns will also be identified, and we will examine the various processes of production, reception, and consumption that illustrated books and cultural magazines undergo as material objects, which will allow us to approach a definition of materiality that encompasses not only attention to the physical medium but also to the interaction between physical properties and the signifying strategies that arise from them. The thematic, aesthetic, and ideological diversity of illustrated literary productions and its role in the socio-cultural fabric of the Spanish Silver Age will be considered, as well as the ways in which text and image are linked and the consequences of this link on the reception and interpretation of the literary works.

In this way, going beyond an exclusively historical-biographical approach, the creative work of these women writers and artists will be addressed, considering them artistic subjects that make up a broad, consolidated and recognizable group, detached from the traditional view of them as a minimal group of isolated or anecdotal cases. Attention will be paid to fundamental issues such as those concerning to the formation of networks of socialisation, association, and collaboration, understanding the relations between text and visual paratext (between woman writers and illustrators) as one of the most perceptible traces of the dense network of cultural relations that were established at the time. In addition, a specific collection of illustrated texts (magazines and books) will be designed, based on a set of data collected from journals and specialised databases. This work aims to contribute, therefore, to the creation of new research data for the study of the relations between art and literature during the interwar period in Spain, as well as to the revision and reconfiguration of the literary canon and the cultural history of the Silver Age.