El tiempo entre costuras: Gendered Vulnerability, Genre and Political Context

María Dueñas’ first novel, El tiempo entre costuras (2009), comprises two distinct parts: a first set during the Republic, within which the author reinscribes various features of the novela rosa; and a second which has the post-Civil War period as a backdrop, and wherein Dueñas reproduces key narrative tenets of the spy novel. My contention here is that Dueñas deploys these generic revisions to portray the different historical contexts in order to illustrate the variable gendered vulnerability experienced by her female characters in the shift from Republican democracy to dictatorship.