Hacia una historia literaria de la maternidad en la democracia española: de la reproducción optimista a la precariedad estructural en Tiempo de espera (1998) de Carme Riera y Las maravillas (2020) de Elena Medel

Comparative literature has historically displayed a tension between the analysis of literary phenomena in their immediate context and the possibility of establishing links between works from different eras. This article proposes to construct a comparative literary history of contemporary motherhood within the framework of Spanish democracy, based on the analysis of two significant novels: Tiempo de espera (1998) by Carme Riera and Las maravillas (2020) by Elena Medel. Spanning more than two decades apart, both works offer divergent but complementary perspectives on the work of motherhood and allow us to consider the shifts that motherhood has undergone in contemporary fiction based on the sociohistorical, material, and symbolic transformations from the 20th to the 21st century. Far from a univocal narrative, what these novels propose is a critical genealogy: a changing cartography of what a maternal body can–and cannot–be in democratic Spain. Embedded within an interdisciplinary perspective that articulates literary, gender, and cultural studies, the work aims to explore the ways in which maternal figures are inscribed in the transformations of reproductive labor, biocapitalism, and the intersections of precariousness between social class and gender.