Reviews of Books

This article was downloaded by: [Illinois State University Milner Library]On: 24 October 2014, At: 12:13Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Bulletin of Spanish Studies: HispanicStudies and Researches on Spain,Portugal and Latin AmericaPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbhs20

Reviews of BooksIrene Zaderenko a , Joseph T. Snow b , Elena Carrera c , John A.Jones d , Vicente Pérez de León e , Julio Baena f , Terence O'Reillyg , Susan L. Fischer h , John Slater i , José Ramón Jouve Martínj , Grady C. Wray k , Ivonne Del Valle l , Timothy D. Walker m ,Carla Rahn Phillips n , Toni Dorca o , Margaret A. Rees p , RichardA. Cardwell q , Peter Gold r , Catherine G. Bellver s , MichaelThompson t , Ryan Prout u , James Scorer v , James J. Pancrazio w

, Robin Fiddian x & David William Foster ya Boston Universityb Michigan State Universityc University of London , Queen Maryd University of Hull.e Oberlin College , Ohiof University of Colorado at Boulderg University College Corkh Bucknell University , Pennsylvaniai University of Coloradoj McGill University , Montrealk University of Oklahomal University of California , Berkeleym University of Massachusetts Dartmouthn University of Minnesota , Twin Citieso Macalester College , Minnesotap Oxfordq University of Nottinghamr University of the West of England , Bristols University of Nevada , Las Vegast University of Durhamu Cardiff University.v Manchester Metropolitan University

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w Illinois State Universityx Wadham College , Oxfordy Arizona State UniversityPublished online: 29 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Irene Zaderenko , Joseph T. Snow , Elena Carrera , John A. Jones , VicentePérez de León , Julio Baena , Terence O'Reilly , Susan L. Fischer , John Slater , José Ramón JouveMartín , Grady C. Wray , Ivonne Del Valle , Timothy D. Walker , Carla Rahn Phillips , Toni Dorca ,Margaret A. Rees , Richard A. Cardwell , Peter Gold , Catherine G. Bellver , Michael Thompson ,Ryan Prout , James Scorer , James J. Pancrazio , Robin Fiddian & David William Foster (2010)Reviews of Books, Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugaland Latin America, 87:6, 849-886, DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2010.513108

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Reviews of Books

Cantar de Mio Cid. Edicion de Juan Carlos Bayo e Ian Michael. Madrid: Editorial Castalia.2008. 484�26 pp.

En las ultimas decadas del siglo pasado, las ediciones de Colin Smith (1972) e Ian Michael(1975) aportaron una renovacion total del texto y de las aproximaciones crıticas al Cantar (oPoema) de Mio Cid (CMC); a estas se han sumado recientemente las enciclopedicas edicionesde Alberto Montaner (1993, 2007). Ante tantas y tan valiosas aportaciones, es posible quealgun estudioso se pregunte con una buena dosis de escepticismo que novedades puede ofreceruna nueva edicion del poema. La respuesta es, sin embargo, que mucho queda por hacer si eleditor esta dispuesto a repensar de manera radical los problemas que atanen al texto, tal comopropuso German Orduna en un trabajo visionario, ‘La edicion crıtica y el codex unicus: el textodel Poema de Mio Cid’, Incipit, 17 (1997), 1�46.

La edicion de Carlos Bayo e Ian Michael ha dado un paso fundamental en este sentido alofrecer novedades significativas y, lo que es mas importante, bien meditadas. En efecto,basandose en ideas expuestas por Bayo en su estudio ‘Poetic Discourse Patterning in theCantar de Mio Cid’, Modern Language Review, 96 (2001), 82�91, se presenta una version muyconservadora del texto con enmiendas mınimas y una nueva distribucion de los versos quepone en tela de juicio el concepto de tirada y la funcion de la rima en el poema.Desafortunadamente, limitaciones de la coleccion en la que ha aparecido la edicion, dirigidaa un publico amplio, no han permitido que se incluyera el aparato crıtico y un largo estudiointroductorio, lo que habrıa facilitado una comprension mas acabada de los cambiosintroducidos. Es de esperar que los editores los den a conocer proximamente.

En la ‘Introduccion’ (11�28) se presenta una breve historia de la epopeya de los pueblosindoeuropeos seguida de un analisis de los aspectos esenciales del poema: el tema, laestructura y la forma poetica. Es en este ultimo apartado donde se introducen las mayoresnovedades que van a incidir en la edicion del texto. Se indica que la forma poetica del CMC noobedece a los principios formales de los cantares franceses, es decir, el verso largo regido por elcomputo silabico y la organizacion en series de versos con una misma rima (16). No existe, enopinion de los editores, ninguna razon de peso para considerar los versos sueltos y dısticos delCMC lecciones corrompidas, pues muchos de estos versos son explicables como casos de‘disonancia deıctica’ que marcan transiciones narrativas (17). La division del poema en 152tiradas introducida por Ramon Menendez Pidal a imitacion de la Chanson de Roland carece deapoyo en el manuscrito*a diferencia de lo que ocurre con el poema frances*y no se mantieneen esta edicion (17). En cambio, se divide el texto segun el contenido de la narracion indicandocon un renglon en blanco las transiciones narrativas, a menudo marcadas por el poeta condisonancias, al igual que los cambios de discurso directo a indirecto (y viceversa) y lastransiciones de un interlocutor a otro.

Acerca del autor, se senala que todo indica que fue una persona culta que compuso elpoema en Castilla durante el reinado de Alfonso VIII (20). Finalmente, se enumeran lasfuentes historicas que se han conservado sobre la vida de Rodrigo Dıaz y se ofrece una sucintabiografıa del heroe castellano.

Las notas a pie de pagina ası como el glosario y el ındice onomastico, que contieneabundante informacion sobre lugares y personajes mencionados en el poema, son pertinentes yde gran utilidad. Aunque se aprovecha el trabajo realizado por Michael en su edicion de

ISSN 1475-3820 print/ISSN 1478-3428 online/10/06/000849-38# Bulletin of Spanish Studies. DOI 10.1080/14753820.2010.513108

Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Volume LXXXVII, Number 6, 2010

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Clasicos Castalia, los datos han sido actualizados y ampliados considerablemente. La ediciondel texto esta acompanada de dos mapas y varias ilustraciones, la mayor parte de las cualesaparece en las paginas finales.

Se han detectado algunos errores en la ‘Introduccion’ de los editores y en las notas a lasilustraciones: el arzobispo Turpın no esta con Carlomagno cuando el monarca halla a Roldanmuerto, ni en Roncesvalles ni en la Chanson de Roland, y dicho episodio no aparece hacia elfinal del poema frances sino mucho antes (15); en el fragmento de Roncesvalles, Carlomagno selamenta ante los cadaveres del arzobispo Turpın, de Oliveros y de Roldan, y esta escenacorresponde al desenlace de la batalla de Roncesvalles (Chanson de Roland, vv. 2855�944). Enlas ultimas paginas sin numerar, en la que deberıa ser la pagina 499 se indica erroneamenteque el cofre del Cid que se exhibe en la catedral de Burgos contiene ‘los restos’ del heroe.Tambien se han deslizado algunas erratas en el texto.

Esta nueva edicion del CMC sera de gran utilidad tanto para estudiantes que se inician enlos estudios cidianos como para profesores interesados en nuevas aproximaciones crıticas altexto.

IRENE ZADERENKO

Boston University.

CONNIE L. SCARBOROUGH, A Holy Alliance: Alfonso X’s Political Use of Marian Poetry.Newark: Juan de la Cuesta. 2009. 206 pp.

Connie L. Scarborough’s book on Alfonso X’s mix of politics and piety is a most welcomesummary of and advance on previous scholarly work. She has absorbed fundamental lessonsgleaned from Joseph F. O’Callaghan (Alfonso X and the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’: A PoeticBiography [Leiden: Brill, 1968]), Manuel Gonzalez Jimenez (Alfonso X, el Sabio [Barcelona:Ariel, 2004]) and Richard P. Kinkade (‘Cantiga 235, and the Events of 1268�1278’, Speculum,67 [1992], 284�323), inter alios, has interwoven them into her own narrative and produced anoriginal contribution to the study of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (hereafter, CSM). Thevolume contains a brief introduction, ten chapters, a bibliography but, surprisingly, nothematic index.

In Chapter 1, ‘King Alfonso X el Sabio: The Author Who Would Be Emperor’, Scarboroughdevelops the wider frame for her topic: Alfonso’s insistence on himself as the legitimate, justhead of a body politic, centralized and active. Alfonso sought this unified vision as a politicallegacy as well as a driving force towards his long but finally unsuccessful pursuit of the crownof the Holy Roman Empire (1256�1275) under the jurisdiction of three popes. Alfonso soughtthe role of Emperor to consolidate his ideal of one Spain under one rule. And this politicalframework is clearly espied in his poetic masterwork, the CSM, as has not been so clearly seenuntil now.

In Chapter 2, ‘The CSM and Marian Devotion’, after a general review of the CSM as awhole, Scarborough’s thrust is concentrated on how Alfonso’s faith and trust in miracles assigns from God aligns him to Mary’s higher authority and her role as an agent in theReconquest in which he was so active. As such, she allows herself to read many of the personalcantigas as a form of devotional statecraft. The strong point that emerges from this chapter isthat the CSM is propaganda for greater devotion to the Virgin, which may explain theenormous variety of ways in which daily life in Alfonso’s Spain is drawn into the vast design ofthe CSM.

Chapter 3 focuses on ‘Alfonso as Troubadour and the ‘‘Cantigas’’ as Historical Record’.From the outset, in Prologue B, Scarborough sees that Alfonso considers himself both asMary’s troubadour and as her spokesperson on earth. It is here that Alfonso establishes hisself assuredness, even though he veils it with the modesty topos common in the initial pages of

850 BSS, LXXXVII (2010) REVIEWS OF BOOKS

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many medieval works. His faith, the bedrock of that surety, is the strong feature that Alfonsodevelops in several cantigas, but the cantiga that receives most critical attention is 169(42�51), in which the poet conflates events of different periods to pinpoint the politicalmessage. Scarborough’s discussion brings to bear a series of historical documents over a periodof time about Alfonso’s desire to add lands in Africa, to overcome the Moorish stronghold inGranada and more, but the strongest political message is that his most unswerving ally is theVirgin Mary. Thus, she is intimately linked to the ongoing success of his repopulation andreconstruction schemes for large swathes of Andalusia.

Chapter 4 continues these themes as Scarborough hones in on ‘The Cycle of El Puerto deSanta Maria’, the last bastion of Alfonso’s reign. The cycle contains twenty-four cantigas from328 (56�61) to 398 and is itself a historical narrative about the role of Alfonso who, withMary?s assiduous miracle-making, wins Alcanate from its Moorish holders, and develops itinto the Christian stronghold and pilgrimage venue afterward called El Puerto de SantaMarıa. Mary’s contributions range from changing minds, allowing the church building tofinish on deadline, preserving the life of its master architect, saving time and signalling ready-quarried building materials, curing the king’s swollen feet, and the creation of a newsanctified space that dovetails perfectly with Alfonso’s political initiatives in the final years ofhis reign.

In Chapter 5, ‘Dealing with a Diverse Population*Moors and Jews’, rather than takingup the thorny issue of whether Alfonso was tolerant or not (scholarship is divided on thispoint), Scarborough takes the route of Alfonso’s programme of Realpolitik, advancing thenotion that Alfonso was more taken with recognizing that Spain’s wide political landscape wascomprised of what are called ‘microsocieties’ and his interest was in implementing policiesthat would unite all of them under one rule. In Chapter 6, ‘Writing in Galician and the Role ofGalicia’, she rehearses well-known ideas about Alfonso’s fondness for his early years spent inGalicia, but emphasizing his championing of Marian shrines (Vilasirga, Terena, Salas andothers) at the expense of Santiago de Compostela, in which Peninsular politics plays anongoing role (her discussion of CSM 218 is clear on this issue).

In Chapter 7, ‘Obstacles and Illnesses’, one of the strongest chapters of the study, theextensive discussions of cantigas 235 (134�45), 209 (145�47), 279 (148�49) and 367 (149�50)and the weakened light in which Alfonso allows himself to be presented are seen asopportunities to show his political enemies, especially in his twilight years, that he wasespecially favoured by the divine (miraculous) interventions of Mary to preserve his politicalprogrammes. In this chapter, we are privy to the manifold machinations and concertedopposition that Alfonso faced and the role that his faith in the Virgin played in preventing hisusurpation. Indeed, the Virgin’s support was a longstanding staple in Alfonso’s family, datingback to the previous century, a sequence of miracles developed in Chapter 8, ‘A FamilyAffair*the Virgin Intercedes for Alfonso and his Family’. The political messages of CSM 122,221, 256, 366 and 376 are massaged carefully and to great use by Scarborough in this context.

In Chapter 9, ‘The Power of Image and Song’, Scarborough develops the ‘official portrait’that Alfonso decreed for the decadal songs, or loores, of the CSM, in which he chooses tobe seen as forever young, leading others in praise of the Virgin*choirmaster as it were for thenation*symbolic of his leadership in Spain in both religious and political affairs. In theserichly significant texts and miniatures, Alfonso projects his own salvation as reward for themutual loyalty shared by the king and his dona das donas (Lady of Ladies).

The volume concludes in Chaper 10 with a ‘Fitting Conclusion*Alfonso’s Piticon’, inwhich cantiga 401 appropriately takes centre stage, forming a perfect ‘bookend’ with theopening prologue B. In it, Alfonso confesses his failings as sinner and his failures as king.These failures notwithstanding, however, his faith in Mary as his personal source of strengthhas never wavered and, as in Prologue B, he here repeats his hope that these CSM, whichdocument his unstinting devotion and recognition of the Virgin’s role in his politicalprogramme, will earn him the reward of being with her some day in Paradise. The CSM,

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Scarborough concludes, end and bestow on Alfonso a palpable source of literary pride and anot inconsiderable dollop of consolation for a political agenda carried out with single-mindedness, even though fraught with missteps.

I have here suppressed the many names and incidents utilized to flesh out thisremarkable account of a life rich in service to God and country. In sum, this book will serveall alfonsinistas well for its careful construction and thought-provoking insights into a literaryproject that most revealingly reflects the ambitious political programme that Alfonso defendedfor the thirty-two years of his reign.

JOSEPH T. SNOW

Michigan State University.

ROGER BARTRA, Melancholy and Culture. Essays on the Diseases of the Soul in GoldenAge Spain. Translated from the Spanish by Christopher Follett. Cardiff: University ofWales Press. 2008. 235 pp.

This skilful translation of Bartra’s Cultura y melancolıa (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2001) is one ofthe most fascinating books on Golden-Age Spanish culture published in English in recentyears. With great lucidity, erudition and attention to detail, Bartra moves the reader acrossthe boundaries of racial, cultural and geographical frontiers, following the symbolic structuresof the Ancient Greek concept of ‘melancholia’ as it gathered momentum in medievalphilosophical and medical writings in Arabic (Ishaq, Haly Abbas, Rhazes, Avicenna) andLatin (Constantin, Vilanova), and in European vernacular cultures from the late sixteenthcentury.

In the first part of the book Bartra defines the theoretical framework in which heinscribes the ‘myth’ of melancholy and its mutations, and moves on to provide a succinct andenlightening discussion of the notions inherited in sixteenth-century Spain, drawing on a widerange of secondary sources on melancholy and lovesickness (notably Jackson, Wack, Beecherand Ciavollela), and on the history of Spanish psychiatry (Ullersperger, Laın Entralgo). Likethe studies on which he draws, Bartra surprisingly omits from his account the popularmedical views on amor hereos and melancholia promoted by the medieval translations intoSpanish of Gordonius and Anglicus.

Bartra’s, however, is not a study of sources. It is an original interpretation of the notion ofmelancholy as a ‘myth’: its intense ‘metaphoric power’ in giving sense to mental disorder andsuffering, its mediating function in ‘communicating feelings of loneliness’ and in expressingthe ‘experience of non-communication’ (17), its long duration, its faithfulness to an originalcanon, and its connections with magical and diabolic rituals. This approach enables Bartra totake an exceptionally wide perspective in examining the seemingly disparate ideasencompassed by the label ‘melancholy’: its association with passionate love, the widespreadmedieval and early modern stereotypes of the melancholic temperament of Jews, the beliefthat the idleness of courtly life was a cause of melancholy, and the sixteenth-century debatesabout witchcraft and melancholic delusion (e.g., Bodin versus Weyer). It also allows him toestablish a correspondence between the medieval and early modern pharmacologicaltreatment of humoural imbalances which affected body and mind, and the modern use ofantidepresssant drugs aimed to correct imbalances between neurotransmitter substances.

In the extensive second part of the book Bartra takes Andres Velasquez’s Libro de lamelancolıa (1585) as a focal point. This little known treatise in Spanish (which had come tolight earlier than the more famous vernacular works on melancholy by Bright, du Laurensand Burton) was included in the excellent critical edition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts produced by Bartra in collaboration with historians and classicists: El siglo de


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oro de la melancolıa. Textos espanoles sobre las enfermedades del alma, ed. Roger Bartra(Mexico D.F.: Univ. Iberoamericana, 1998).

Bartra acknowledges that Melancholy and Culture is somewhat indebted to that earliercollaboration. But here he adds some very insightful ways of bringing those texts closer to ourlives. For instance, when dealing with exotic Galenic ideas about the concoction of humoursand of the vital and psychic spirits or pneumata which were thought to be responsible forcognition, sensation and movement, Bartra stresses the connections between Galenic theoryand everyday practices recognizable to the reader: ‘on reading Velasquez we can imagine theventricles as cauldrons in the brain’s kitchen, where the spirits are cooked as a result of thenatural heat that emanates from the heart’ (42). Going from text to historical context, Bartraencourages the reader to imagine Velasquez’s daily routine in Arcos de la Frontera: walkingfrom the local monastery in which he might have heard mass, and perhaps stopping to see tothe health of the local prostitutes. A few references to Arcos’ history allow Bartra to readVelasquez’s views on melancholy as rooted in a culture of frontiers, confrontation andacculturation.

Another example of Bartra’s exceptional ability to guide his readers is his reference toDescartes’ explanation that heavy and thick blood is a cause of sadness. Having thusillustrated the early modern understanding of the emotions as being rooted in the body, hegoes on to show how this informs Sor Juana de la Cruz’s poetry. None the less, when it comesto reading Fray Luis’, San Juan’s and Santa Teresa’s references to melancholy, Bartra is lessconcerned with its physiological dimension than with the power of this term to evoke states ofconfusion, solitude and dejection.

Having briefly analysed La Celestina in relation to Wack’s account of lovesickness, Bartraends his book with a captivating reading of Don Quijote’s melancholy as ‘artificial sorrow’,which supports his argument about the necessary mutation of myths. The argument might notconvince all readers, but it provides a very effective way of travelling through the medievaland early modern constellations of ideas about melancholy, without losing sight of our own.

ELENA CARRERA

Queen Mary, University of London.

FREDERIC CONROD, Loyola’s Greater Narrative. The Architecture of the ‘SpiritualExercises’ in Golden Age and Enlightenment Literature. Series II, RomanceLanguages and Literature 229. New York/Washington, DC/Bern etc.: Peter Lang. 2008.x�255 pp.

Prompted by Barthes’ view in Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1917) that these works exhibit ‘a similarobsession with the kind of structures that he calls the ‘‘total occupation of the mentalterritory’’ of their readers’ (9), Conrod focuses on St Ignatius’ relatively short but immenselyinfluential Spiritual Exercises.

Following a comparative, theoretical line, his study is ambitious in its scope. He not onlyexamines the influence of and reactions to St Ignatius’ manual, initially in Italy and later inSpain and France, but he deals with the problematic meanings of terms such as theRenaissance, the Baroque, the Enlightenment. He places Spiritual Exercises in the context ofthe Counter-Reformation and the Magisterium of the Church, reaffirmed at the time as adefence against Luther’s claim to the unmediated grace of God. This he sees as part of ‘thegreater narrative’ (5) of the Church of Rome into which the individual who follows St Ignatius’meditations will inscribe him/herself. The term ‘narrative’ raises the related literary elementof the role of the imagination in St Ignatius’ early life and in Spiritual Exercises in which thesenses are summoned to evoke images from the exercitant’s ‘image reservoir’, albeit within thelimits imposed by the director. This process of directed meditations, or more controversially, of


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control of mental territory, involves the play of imagination in representing through thevarious senses the ‘orders of corruption’*sin, the corruptibility of worldly things, theephemeral, death, evil in all its forms, contrasted with the heavenly and divine. On anotherlevel, Conrod studies this aspect of Ignatian influence in the architecture of Jesuit churches inRome, the Holy City, itself a symbol of the decay and corruptibility of past ages. In thisrespect, St Ignatius is placed at the centre of the rise of visual art in the Counter-Reformation.However, it is through literature mainly that Conrod develops his thesis.

He examines the influence of Spiritual Exercises on Cervantes’ works, particularly DonQuixote and Persiles. As an ex-pupil of the Jesuits, Cervantes was well acquainted with theirteachings and spirituality. Inevitably, Conrod sees influence of the director/exercitantrelationship not merely between Don Quijote and Sancho but also, in a more complex way,within the tension created by conflicting worlds within each of the characters individually.Several other points of interest are brought out, such as the memento mori dimension of DonQuixote and Spiritual Exercises and, with regard to Persiles, the tension between good and evilfaced by the characters and the acknowledgement that ‘humans as pilgrims should preciselyseek the corruption in the darkest places of this world’ (123).

Unsurprisingly, the other major writer that Conrod examines is Baltasar Gracian. Here themain focus is on El criticon which clearly reflects a dual relationship between a director and apupil in the figures of Critilo and Andrenio. However, Conrod emphasizes Gracian’s position asa Jesuit who opens the path towards the Enlightenment, as a writer and thinker whotransforms the visual practices of Spiritual Exercises but who is detached from Ignatianspirituality. His concerns go beyond the spiritual into the realm of philosophy and politics,seeking understanding of the origins and nature of humankind. His work calls for moreimmersion in the world rather than detachment from it, a motif which will develop in theEnlightenment with its interest in understanding the world in terms of Nature rather than God.

In the concluding chapter, the Marquis de Sade’s works are placed in the context of theinfluence of Golden-Age Spanish writers in France and of the reaction against the Jesuits inthat country by writers who were their ex-pupils. Conrod points to ‘Jesuit casuistry and therelated defense of flexibility regarding morality and the sinful nature of human beings’ (180)as in part sowing the seeds of this reaction and the consequent transformation of the essentialpractices of Spiritual Exercises for inverse purposes. Through Cent Vingt Journees, LaPhilosophie dans le Boudoir, Justine and Histoire de Juliette, Conrod brings out how thelibertine writers reproduce Christian/Jesuit practices in order to deconstruct them: ‘theimagination is [ . . .] called upon to be the medium and instrument of the spiritual/sexualoperation’ (201).

A challenging book of this nature will inevitably give rise to some questioning responses.Although it is well written in part, some statements are enigmatic or faulty, and the proof-reading could have been much improved. In addition, there are at least two instances whereseveral lines of text are repeated, and an inaccurate statement about the first SpanishPolyglot Bible.

JOHN A. JONES

University of Hull.

Cervantes en la modernidad. Coordinado por Jose Angel Ascunce y Alberto Rodrıguez.Cervantes y su Mundo 5. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger. 2008. 332 pp.

La editorial Reichenberger nos ofrece el quinto volumen de su coleccion Cervantes en lamodernidad, en este caso al cuidado de los profesores Ascunce y Rodrıguez. Aunque losartıculos destacan por su originalidad y eclecticismo, nos llama la atencion el estudiobibliografico de los editores sobre los mismos, incluido como colofon de la obra. En el se


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destaca que los crıticos cervantinos ‘tradicionales’ siguen siendo los mas citados por los propiosautores del volumen, obsequiandonos con un ilustre podio: Riley, Castro y Avalle-Arce/Ortegay Gasset. Esta paradojica situacion define muy bien el pasado, presente y futuro de losestudios cervantinos, en los que la modernidad esta inscrita inseparablemente dentro de latradicion y viceversa.

El volumen esta dividido en tres partes. La primera consta de una serie de estudios sobrela obra cervantina propiamente dicha dentro de la seccion ‘Miguel de Cervantes: modernidadde la escritura’. En la segunda se analizan temas como la recepcion, ademas de obrasinspiradas en las cervantinas bajo el tıtulo ‘Miguel de Cervantes: modernidad en lareescritura’; el libro culmina con el apuntado estudio bibliografico de conjunto: ‘Lecturas yrelecturas cervantinas’.

‘Miguel de Cervantes: modernidad de la escritura’ se inicia con un artıculo de Abellan enel que defiende la importancia de Dulcinea, que independientemente de su no existencia fısicaen la obra, siempre es objeto de trascendente debate. Ascunce, por su parte, realiza un amplioestudio sobre el rol e importancia de Cide Hamete Benengeli, inscribiendolo en el contexto delQuijote a partir de su marginal ‘arabidad’, la cual comienza con el desdoblamiento linguısticodel propio Miguel de Cervantes, encubierto en el nombre de este arabe imaginado. Chenrealiza un analisis cuidadoso de dos refranes en el Quijote, los cuales estudia a partir de laPragmatica Linguıstica, confirmando que para poder alcanzar a descubrir su pleno significadohay que entenderlos siempre mas alla de su sentido literal. Heinz-Peter estudia el recurso dela sorpresa a partir de su inscripcion dentro de la fase de la inventio del arte retorico,contextualizando ası las expectativas que tiene el texto en torno a la participacion necesaria deun ‘ocupado lector’ y siempre dentro del panorama mayor de la presencia del Quijote I en elQuijote II. Fine nos presenta parte de un proyecto mas amplio en el que contrastara lapresencia de la Biblia en toda la obra cervantina. Como anticipo, Fine investiga ejemplos delmodo de asimilacion de la literatura sapiencial, analizando en concreto el rol desestabilizadorde los Proverbios en El licenciado vidriera y la presencia de los Salmos en El rufian viudo.Parodi realiza un analisis comparativo de ciertos episodios de novelas caballerescas insertadasen el Quijote, desglosandolas para concluir que su existencia contribuye a elevar el sentido deautorreferencialidad general, ademas de servir para guiar y ordenar algunos episodios clavede la obra. Vila utiliza mitos como los de Apolo y Dafne o Pıramo y Tisbe, encuadrados enmarco referencial del ‘Laberinto de Perseo’, para elaborar un estudio mitologico con el quedescifrar algunos de los episodios mas significativos del Quijote, tales como los de Cardenio,Dulcinea, o la de Sierra Morena.

‘Miguel de Cervantes: modernidad en la reescritura’ se abre con la aportacion de GonzalezBriz en la que estudia el panorama cultural de la recepcion de la obra cervantina en el siglo XXen Uruguay. Momentos historicos clave*como fueron los centenarios delQuijote*contribuyeron a la mitificacion, tanto del autor como de la obra por parte deintelectuales hispanoamericanos como Darıo, Rodo y Zorrilla de San Martın, a los que seuniran exiliados de la talla de Felipe o Alberti. Rodrıguez nos llama la atencion en su ensayosobre la obra de Esteban Borrero Echevarrıa, escritor del XIX cubano que en su ‘Don Quijote,poeta’ desarrolla la tesis de que se es posible alcanzar la paz y la armonıa a partir de lacombinacion de arte y nobleza de espıritu. Stoopen hace un estudio comparado entre losrecursos literarios empleados en ‘Nombre Falso’*nouvelle de Piglia*y los propioscervantinos, concluyendose que en ambos autores existe un permanente juego entre elconcepto de realidad y ficcion, orientado a captar mas profundamente la atencion del lector.Costa Vieira realiza un analisis comparativo a tres bandas entre Luciano, Cervantes yMachado de Assis, en el que se estudian temas tales como la pertinencia y reconocimiento delheroısmo, concluyendo que existen argumentos para poder establecer una conexion entre losautores elegidos desde su utilizacion de la satira y la parodia, entre otras tecnicas discursivas.Dematte llama la atencion sobre la recepcion del Quijote en la Italia del siglo XVII,condicionada por la presencia de las traducciones de Franciosini y Adimari. La crıtica


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destaca especialmente que, en muchos casos, el texto se leıa en el idioma original, aportandotambien valiosos estudios de traduccion sobre diferentes pasajes clave del Quijote. MataIndurain recupera la figura del filosofo David Garcıa Bacca, exiliado tras la guerra civil,mediante el analisis de su obra Sobre el ‘Quijote’ y don Quijote de la Mancha: ejerciciosliterario-filosoficos, en la cual encuentra cuatro categoriales cervantinos: ‘Senorıo’, ‘Salero’,‘Corazonada’ y ‘Raciocinancia’. Por ultimo, Rodrıguez Gonzalez defiende la presencia delQuijote en ‘El hereje’ de Miguel Delibes. Su protagonista, Cipriano Salcedo, presenta rasgosquijotescos en su deseo de introducir en su sociedad los valores de la libertad de conciencia y lafraternidad; en ambas obras los suenos acaban desvaneciendose, pero la actitud y el denuedoen promover deseos imposibles permanecera para siempre en la memoria de los lectores.

En conclusion, recibimos con placer este conjunto de artıculos basados principalmente enestudios sobre aspectos especıficos de la obra de Cervantes, tanto como en analisiscomparativos. Ambas perspectivas contribuyen a la creacion de un volumen equilibrado yde fluida lectura, atractivo para todos aquellos curiosos por saber cuales son los temas yaspectos cervantinos que siguen fascinando a los crıticos del siglo XXI. Lo que es seguro es quela enorme variedad de perspectivas y propuestas de analisis no dejara indiferente a ningun‘desocupado lector’.

VICENTE PEREZ DE LEON

Oberlin College, Ohio.

ENRIQUE GARCIA SANTO-TOMAS, Modernidad bajo sospecha. Salas Barbadillo y lacultura material del siglo XVII. Madrid: Consejo Superior de InvestigacionesCientıficas. 2008. 207 pp.

Aunque este libro en su tıtulo promete hablar de tres cosas, se lo he de recomendar mucho masa quienes tengan curiosidad por saber acerca de la segunda (‘Salas Barbadillo’) que a quienesquisieren enterarse de la primera (‘Modernidad bajo sospecha’) o de la tercera ‘la culturamaterial del siglo XVII’. No es que el libro no hable de ellas, sino que, desde el comienzo, lascasi siempre sustanciosas observaciones y buen metodo crıtico con que las trata, quedan ensegundo plano, y en inconexa logica, al servir todo ello al proposito del autor de ‘rescatar’ la‘pluma excelsa’ de un autor en una ‘situacion de olvido absoluto’ (todas las citas son de la p. 13)que obviamente es percibida como injusta, como una ‘lamentable negligencia historica’.

Este pecado original acompana al libro, impidiendole reemplazar con uno propio, basadoen el enfoque tematico escogido (la cultura material), el ‘sentido de coherencia’ inexistente enla obra de Barbadillo (‘No existe tal cosa en Salas’ [14]). Lastima que esto ocurra, porque meparece mas interesante concentrarse en hablar ordenada y sistematicamente de la culturamaterial del siglo XVII en Madrid que en defender o ‘rescatar’ a Salas Barbadillo,especialmente si se adopta un punto de vista materialista-cultural, neohistoricista oneomaterialista, que, ironicamente, son los que adopta el autor. Lastima, repito, porque,ademas, los comentarios, analisis, correlaciones, lecturas que se hacen de los elementos decultura material a lo largo del libro, que son muchısimos, son inmejorables, a pesar de sudispersion; son, en efecto, buenas monografıas diminutas, del tabaco, del coche, de lacirculacion de capital simbolico de la mesa puesta. El autor penetra sutilmente en lasdialecticas entre objetos, entre sujeto y objeto, entre fetiche y mercancıa. Abundan en el librolas precisiones de elegantısimo crıtico, tales como ‘coche y mujer van, por tanto, unidos’ (132),que presenta certeramente la increıble colusion entre mujer y coche, digna de un anunciomoderno de automoviles, para preparar la de mujer y enfermedad. El Capıtulo I, comienzadando una excelente sıntesis del trasfondo socio-economico espanol de la epoca. De ahı seencamina a explicar la nocion de ‘fetiche’ central a todo estudio de la cultura material. Elfetiche es visto por el autor, en otra de sus habituales sıntesis impecables, como ‘la radical


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individuacion del objeto’; ‘articulador cultural’ y no ‘mero producto’ (42), insertandose el libro,pues, en una red de conexiones escolasticas que llevan a los diferentes neohistoricismos, y aautores como Daniel Miller, Vıctor Buchli, o Pierre Bourdieu. Termina el capıtulo con ejemplosde objetos cuyo mecanismo de autonomıa de fetiche en circulacion ‘cuestiona*si no cancelatotalmente*la supuesta autonomıa del sujeto renacentista’ (55). Pone atencion el autor enque muchos de los objetos que componen la cultura material espanola de la epoca son objetosprovenientes del Nuevo Mundo, y por lo tanto resemantizados, reempaquetados en el uso o elcambio de lo simbolico.

El Capıtulo II consta de una biografıa de Salas Barbadillo, un recuento y un intento deordenacion generico-tematica de sus muchas obras. De esto se pasa a una interesante mini-monografıa sobre la Calle Mayor de Madrid como eje de una cuidad sin centro, y se pasa alasunto de la misantropıa como ‘mal del siglo’, y a un estudio de una de las obras de Barbadilloque al final desemboca en buenos apuntes sobre la cultura material y los objetos.

El Capıtulo III aprovecha que Barbadillo estaba especialmente bien situado dentro delmundo de las Academias y Parnasos de su epoca, para explorar la ‘agencialidad cultural’primero, y la cultura material culinaria despues.

El Capıtulo IV se centra en las obras de Barbadillo que mejor sirven para ilustrar una‘poetica de la enfermedad’, en relacion con objetos emblematicos de la epoca, como el coche, ytambien en relacion con las lonjas, o depositarios de lo sobrante, y los cosmeticos. Estatendencia ‘miscelanea’ continua en el Capıtulo V, en que se pasa de hablar delmatrimonio*como uno de los principales ‘mercados’ del fetiche*a hablar del lujo. Si bienla habitual buena lectura de textos que siempre hace el autor consigue encontrar lasarticulaciones entre estos diversos temas, el mismo confiesa, al abrir el Epılogo, que le resultaimposible ‘el disenar un libro que trate de todas y cada una de sus piezas’ y que pasa, pues,‘ahora’ (en la p. 185) a ‘dar coherencia y perspectiva a lo que ha sido un analisis selectivo’. Elautor*lastima*no se refiere a dar coherencia a los temas de analisis (‘Modernidad bajosospecha’ y ‘la cultura material’). Estos quedan preteridos, como dije, por una operacion derescate.

JULIO BAENA

University of Colorado at Boulder.

The Spanish Ballad in the Golden Age. Essays for David Pattison. Edited by NigelGriffin, Clive Griffin, Eric Southworth and Colin Thompson. Coleccion Tamesis. Serie A:Monografıas 264. Woodbridge: Tamesis. 2008. 272 pp.

In their introduction to the studies collected in this book, the editors explain that theirpurpose is not to provide an anthology of Golden-Age ballads, or a comprehensive study of theromancero nuevo, but instead to identify the kinds of difficulty that modern readers of theballads encounter, and to offer some informed guidance towards resolving them. With this endin mind they provide close readings of ten romances, each of which is printed in full,translated line by line, and analysed in detail. Four of the ballads are by Gongora and four byQuevedo; the remaining two are by Lope and the little known Salvador Jacinto Polo deMedina. All the commentaries are written with students in mind: they do not assumespecialist knowledge on the part of the reader, and they share an expository style which evenin the densest passages remains clear and precise. But they will be of interest also to Golden-Age scholars, for they are learned and closely argued, and each, in its own way, breaks newground.

Some of the difficulties associated with love poetry, especially in ballads that draw on theconventions of amor cortes, are tackled by Ronald Truman in his essay on ‘El lastimadoBelardo’ of Lope and his note on Gongora’s ‘En los pinares de Jucar’. Both poems, he argues,


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combine allusions to the real world with ‘scenes and associations of a highly poeticised nature’(21), and in each case resonance with the reader depends on recognizing ‘its connectedness tothe literary world that lies behind it’ (3). In Lope’s poem the literary world evoked is theconvention of Renaissance pastoral, exemplified in the Diana of Montemayor, where theclassical tradition is blended with, and modified by, Courtly Love, as Petrarch in particularunderstood it. In Gongora’s poem the literary context is more complex: it goes back not only tothe romancero viejo and Renaissance culture (as Colin Smith contended) but also to the idyllsof Theocritus and the serranillas poems of the Marques de Santillana. Love is also the concernof Colin Thompson in his commentary on Gongora’s ‘En un pastoral albergue’, whose roots hetraces to a range of inherited traditions (classical, Petrarchan, the romancero viejo andAriosto). He demonstrates in detail how these are reworked in conceptista fashion to create ‘avirtually self-contained poem with a strong erotic charge’ (77), and in doing so he drawsattention to a paradox that runs through Gongora’s work: the ballad is constructedingeniously, with all the resources of culto artifice, yet the world into which it draws thereader is one of natural beauty and simplicity.

The nature of humour and the role of laughter as the Golden Age understood them canalso cause problems today, and a number of essays touch on the notions of reasonableness anddecorum that inform comic ballads, and the difficulty of distinguishing in them betweenburlas and veras. Such issues come to the fore in Eric Southworth’s commentary on Gongora’s‘Arrojose el mancebito’. He deftly shows how, in this skit on the tale of Hero and Leander, theprotagonists are portrayed hilariously as idiots, but he goes further and argues that thelaughter this inspires is used to teach a moral lesson: their necedad is a lack of the cardinalvirtue of prudence that the neo-Stoics prized, and consequently they deserve ‘all they get’. Isthis to read too much into the ballad’s fun? The editors do not think so: ‘examples of comicmaterial indulged in simply for the hell of it are rare’ (xii), they affirm. But they allow anexception in the case of Quevedo’s ‘Testamento de Don Quijote’. This John Rutherford reads as‘a piece of fun for fun’s sake’ (81), in which Don Quixote comes across as a slapstick character,much as he does in Part One of Cervantes’ novel. Even here, however, the humour does notstand alone: it has a cutting edge, evident in Quevedo’s desire to attack Cervantes by treatinghis protagonist ‘with sadistic contempt’ (90), particularly in the portrayal of his death. Mostcritics have dated the ballad to the period after Part Two (1615) appeared, but Rutherfordnotes that all the incidents parodied in it belong to Part One, and he argues for an earlier date(1605�14). From this he concludes, significantly, that Cervantes probably had it in mind whencomposing Part Two, and that in the deathbed scene at the end of the novel he sought towrongfoot Quevedo (as earlier he had wrongfooted Avellaneda).

Further difficulties have to do with religious, literary and topical allusions that Golden-Age writers could make lightly, but that nowadays have become remote. These includereferences to the Classics and the Bible, notions such as desengano, discrecion and agudeza,and oblique allusions to contemporary people and events. Clive Griffin confronts such mattersin his chapter on ‘Son las torres de Joray’, where he explains how Quevedo adapts theconvention of evoking ruined buildings in order to portray the precarious nature of life,especially in the world of the Court. The ballad, which is neo-Stoic in theme, makes its pointby playing subtly on the contrast between parecer and ser, not only in its statements andmetaphors but also in its structure, which is wittily crafted to prompt in the reader ‘a flash ofenlightenment’ (95). Something similar, it appears, takes place in Gongora’s ‘Nobledesengano’, where a puzzling change of tone occurs exactly halfway through. This EricSouthworth clarifies by seeing the poem as a dramatisation of desengano: an invented‘soliloquizing character’ (26) is placed before us, as on a stage, to evoke the painful process ofenlightenment in both serious and comic terms.

All the ballads discussed play with language in clever and pleasurable ways, especiallythe comic ones, where puns, conceits and double-entendres abound. Here Quevedo is a master.As Colin Thompson observes, in his commentary on ‘A la corte vas, Perico’, ‘it is impossible to


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follow the twists and turns [ . . .] unless one is aware of the multiple meanings of many of thewords Quevedo uses and the ways in which he plays them off against each other (which makesfull and accurate translation well nigh impossible)’ (117). Nigel Griffin’s study of ‘Losborrachos’ illustrates the truth of this. He traces the multiplication of meanings, some of themcreated through the syntax, in a ballad ‘peppered [ . . .] with innuendo and wordplay’ (136), andhe ends by concurring with the judgment of Borges: ‘la grandeza de Quevedo es verbal’. Buthis close reading, though exhaustive is not closed: enigmatic passages, once discussed, are leftopen to further debate. Wordplay is a feature too of the ballad by Polo de Medina, whichretells, in burlesque fashion, the tale of Venus’ adultery with Mars and Vulcan’s revenge.Oliver Noble Wood places it thoughtfully in its classical and Renaissance contexts. He arguesthat it is, in part, a response to Juan de la Cueva’s more serious ‘Los amores de Marte y Venus’(1604), but he underlines also that in Homer and Ovid the story is meant to amuse: ‘Polosubverts a myth that is already in some sense a parody’ (181). The volume concludes with aseries of indices (a general one, and others to words and phrases discussed, first lines andpoem titles) which make it available as a work of reference as well as a continuous text, and itis dedicated to David Pattison, whose collegiality, scholarship and dedication to teaching arecommended warmly.

TERENCE O’REILLY

University College Cork.

LAURA R. BASS, The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early ModernSpain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2008. xii�180 pp.

Laura R. Bass has written a beautiful and significant book: aesthetically pleasing in terms ofthe sixty-seven illustrations (a large number in colour) and the comprehensible scholarlystyle; and conceptually discerning in respect of the historical, material and theoreticalreadings of select plays interwoven with visual images, the thorough documentation in theaccompanying notes, and the exhaustive bibliographical apparatus.

The recurring drama of the portrait it expounds is to be apprehended, Bass states in theIntroduction, ‘in the context of the social and cultural milieu that accounts for and was, in turn,shaped by the interrelated place of the theater at the center of a newly urban court society andthe increasing role of portraiture in urban social commerce’ (2). These ‘dramas of theportrait’*whether comedic, tragic, or farcical*all expose moments of crisis in therepresentational ground that defined both the individual subject and the nation inseventeenth-century Spain vis-a-vis the social, political, and economic tensions of the age. AsBass affirms in her ‘Concluding Reflections’, they ‘belong to a culture at once invested in theauthority of representation and anxious about its power to reshape and unmake identities’ (127);portraits were ‘objects of courtly play with serious, sometimes deadly, consequences’ (131).

Chapter 1 (‘Visual Literacy and Urban Comedy’) treats the lessons of ‘dissimulation’ inLope de Vega’s La dama boba on the one hand, and of ‘affected display’ in Alonso de CastilloSolorzano’s El mayorazgo figura on the other; if in seventeenth-century Madrid, the formermode of behaviour was necessary, the latter was to be avoided. These comic misreadingsunderscore the importance of ‘theatrical’ awareness in Madrid society, of guarding againstfalse appearances. Peter Paul Ruben’s portrait of Henri IV Receiving the Portrait of Marie de’Medicis, an anonymous Portrait of an Embroiderer, and Vicente Carducho’s treatise, Dialogosde la pintura, are material measures of the art market and art theory integrated into thecomedic analyses.

Chapter 2 (‘Stolen Identities’), which takes up Tirso de Molina’s El vergonzoso en palacio,centres on ‘theater and portraiture as homologous cultural and material practices with thepower, at once seductive and perilous, to shape and unmake identities’ (10). In a preliminary


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section on ‘portraiture and authorship’, the frontispiece self-portrait of Alonso de Villegas inhis edition of Flos sanctorum is used, along with an accompanying gloss that anchors theauthor’s anxiety over ‘textual usurpation’ (44), to emblematize the pre-dramatic forgery of asignature that sets Tirso’s play in motion. The exchange of clothing in the opening scene islikewise visualized in a portrait of Philip III’s brother-in-law, which extends Tirso’s mockery ofexcessive court finery and connects the sartorial display inherent in theatre and portraiture.Subsequently, Bass’ penetrating analysis of Serafina’s ‘drag rehearsal’, in terms of therelationship of costume, cross-dressing and ‘dramatic becoming’ (51), embroiders upon the‘receding degrees of illusion’ (49) which Henry Sullivan has identified in both Tirso’s rehearsalscene and Diego Velazquez’s Las hilanderas. Crucial to this section, too, is the parallel Bassdraws between the staging of Serafina’s theatrical performance as a rehearsal and thespotlighting of the portrait, not as a finished product, but rather as a mediated process inproduction, involving ‘the meeting of art theory and the art market, fantasy and materiality,spectacular projections and economic transaction’ (55). Chapter 3 (‘Blood Portraits’), whosefocus is Calderon de la Barca’s El pintor de su deshonra, reveals the ways in which‘creative*and procreative*failure in the drama comments on the tragic limitations not onlyof a husband’s desire but also of an exhausted nation’ under Philip IV’s reign (10). Calderon’splay, Bass posits, ‘builds on the same conceptual linkage between portraiture andreproduction (social, economic, and biological) that informed the group portraits included inmany patents of nobility’ (77; illustrations, 65). Similarly, the domestic drama*culminatingin the final ‘picture in blood’ that Juan Roca ‘paints’ with his pistols*is thought to index‘larger political anxieties’ (77), associated with visual genealogies and proclaimed dynasticcontinuity. These anxieties are highlighted in the portrait, Charles II Surrounded by Imagesof His Ancestors, discussed in the chapter’s opening section on portraiture and bloodlines(62�63). Also intriguing is the contrastive incorporation of Albrecht Durer’s Artist Drawing aModel in Foreshortening through a Frame Using a Grid System to reflect not the artist’smastery over his subject, as in the latter woodcut, but the husband’s powerlessness.

In Chapter 4 (‘The Powers and Perils of Doubles’), Calderon’s El mayor monstruo delmundo is studied, not in terms of ‘mimetic failure’, but of ‘mimetic reduplication’ (10). QueenMariene’s jewel-encased portrait discovered by the Tetrarch of Jerusalem, and its larger copyin the hands of his rival Octaviano, become the core of the play’s ‘economy of duplication andduplicity, one in which a rivalry of personal passion doubles for one of political ambition, andspecular identifications lead to dangerous divisions’; and, by extension, one in which‘Calderon’s awareness of the vulnerabilities of the Spanish Habsburg representationalregime’ may be foregrounded (10). El mayor monstruo is contextualized through a lengthydiscussion of Velazquez’s portraits of Philip IV not simply as representations, if notconstructions, of the king’s sovereign body, or body politic, but as works admired for theartistic skill that went into the representation/construction. The theatrics of power stagedaround the portrait of the king in real life, Bass reminds us, was on many counts mirrored inthe theatre itself: not only in the ritual formality that surrounded royalty’s arrival anddeparture, but also in the iconic power of their painted likenesses reflected back, for example,in Tirso’s La prudencia en la mujer and in Lope’s El Brasil restituido. Calderon’s Amor, honory poder and Darlo todo y no dar nada are also referenced, respectively, to recall the king’shuman person, including his defects, and to underscore the problem of balancing truth anddecorum in representations of the king. The workings of power and representation in El mayormonstruo are underscored by yet one more contrastive leap*characteristic of Bass’comprehensive method*into the world of contemporary portraiture; the neatly hierarchicalimage of the monarchy captured in Juan de Courbes’ portrait of Don Garcıa Hurtado deMendoza, Viceroy of Peru, is invoked as a contrast to the play’s dark side; on a deeper level,Bass suggests, Calderon pushes to dramatic extreme ‘a conflictive potential looming withinthe monarchical structure*a potential for a collapse in the hierarchy of reflections on which itwas built’ (90). El mayor monstruo’s ‘linkage of reduplication and usurpation’ is further


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framed by Francisco de Quevedo’s ‘Discurso’ on favouritism, modelled on the Count-Duke ofOlivares as Philip IV’s ‘secondary reflection’ (92); if not more disconcertingly revealed throughthe king’s ‘twin image’ in Juan Bautista Maino’s telling tapestry portrait, The Recapture ofBahıa in 1625. Calderon’s own doubling of the dramatic composition of El mayor monstruo inthe same years in which Spain seemed to many to be ruled, not by its proper king but by theminister, is not overlooked by Bass. Nor is a complementary glimpse into the ‘perfectingpotential of reflections and portraits’ (99) disregarded: in the ‘bejeweled and jewel-like’ (95)portrait of Mariene, her character and dress resonate with European ideals and images offemale sovereignty become clear, if Philip IV’s second wife, Mariana of Austria, is taken as ayardstick of comparison. If Bass frames her close reading of Calderon’s drama within the earlymodern drama of the portrait, she does not privilege historicity/materiality over textuality,thereby avoiding what is arguably the most censured aspect of the new historical/culturalmaterial approach.

Chapter 5 (‘Framing the Margins on Center Stage’) considers the Juan Rana ‘portraitinterludes’*Agustın Moreto’s El retrato vivo, Antonio de Solıs’ El retrato de Juan Rana, andSebastian de Villaviciosa’s work of the same name*against the backdrop of the mimetic playincarnate in portraits of jesters and dwarfs by Alonso Sanchez Coello (e.g., The Infanta IsabelClara Eugenia and Magdalena Ruiz), Rodrigo de Villandrando (e.g., Prince Philip and theDwarf ‘Soplillo’), and Velazquez (e.g., Baltasar Carlos and Dwarf, Prince Baltasar Carlos inthe Riding School and Las meninas). If, in these portraits, the ‘fun figures’ were physicallypositioned at the margins, the margins were constitutive of the centre as representatives ofwhat Fernando Bouza terms the ‘rough backside [enves rugoso] of a fabric’s magnificent frontside’ (107); nevertheless, the dwarf and jester portraits of the first two aforementioned artists‘project a rather static hierarchy of reflections’, while those of Velazquez ‘stage decidedly moremobile play’ (108). Not surprisingly, for Bass, the multiple workings of the dwarf and jesterpaintings (most especially Velazquez’s), whose protagonists appear in a complex dynamics ofmargins and centre and in plays of contrastive and deforming reflections, are also those of theJuan Rana portrait interludes (112). Each interlude is read against the drama of the times,whether alluding to ‘the social divisions within early modern Spain’s class hierarchy’ (Moreto;116), reflecting back on ‘a monarchy in its own gender crisis’ (Solıs; 120), or creating not only ‘adeformed mirror image of royal reproduction’ but also ‘a portrait of the royal family’s ownpotential for deformity’ (Villaviciosa; 123).

Bass’ social history of portraiture, interspersed with treatises on painting and combinedwith illuminating readings of selected dramatic works, is a valuable contribution tointerdisciplinary study in general and to Spanish Golden-Age study in particular. In fact,her book, with its myriad allusions to theatrical and visual culture in early modern Spain, hasmade me want to reread some details of the productions explored in my recent book, ReadingPerformance: Spanish Golden Age Theatre and Shakespeare on the Modern Stage(Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2009), in the light of ‘the drama of the portrait’. To stimulateintellectual engagement of that sort is surely the mark of a superior scholarly endeavour.

SUSAN L. FISCHER

Bucknell University, Pennsylvania.

The ‘Comedia’ in English: Translation and Performance. Edited by Susan Paun deGarcıa and Donald R. Larson. Coleccion Tamesis. Serie A: Monografıas 261. Woodbridge:Tamesis. 2008. 320 pp.

Those who act as intermediary between the words of a playwright and the understanding of apublic, with the goal of facilitating a particular experience of those words, have many names.One of them is censor. Another is translator, and the role of translation in shaping an


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audience’s experience of the comedia is a central concern for the contributors to this engagingcollection. Across the span of seventeen articles, scholars, translators and directors outline atheory, practice, and at times almost an ethic of helping the comedia reach English-speakingaudiences.

Opening the collection is an introduction by the editors that gives readers a history of thecomedia in English translation from the Restoration until today. It also introduces a number oftheoretical and practical concerns that attract the attention of nearly every contributor. One ofthese is how to translate Spanish polymetric verse. Victor Dixon flatly states that to ignorepolymetric verse ‘is clearly to misrepresent [the comedias’] distinctive nature’ (61). A. RobertLauer maintains that ‘rhyming verse was essential to the drama of the Spanish Golden Age’(61), while David Johnston just as confidently claims that to ‘dictate that translations intoEnglish should mimic the same polymetrics is essentialist’ (72). In a related disagreementSusan L. Fischer shows a healthy suspicion of any ‘stable and authoritative text’, entering intovigorous dialogue with Lauer’s concern for a ‘pristine text upon which the initial act of violenceof a translation is first inflicted’ (203).

In separate essays Dakin Matthews*who has been deservedly applauded for his versetranslations*and Dawn L. Smith bravely provide side-by-side comparisons of original textsand their own, Smith generously going as far as to compare her own translation of Cervantes’La guarda cuidadosa to Kathleen Mountjoy’s. Rounding out the section is Catherine Larson’sfine essay on her prose translation of Zayas’ Traicion en la amistad. Being able to look over theshoulder, as it were, of translators while they demonstrate how they overcame particularchallenges is among the pleasures of the book.

A second area of debate is how to make comedias accessible to audiences in performance.Once again, Johnston is winningly opinionated, stating his distaste for the ‘crass subjectivism’of ‘Clotaldo in a pinstripe suit’ (71). Other contributors make a persuasive case for updatingthe comedia. The good sense that prevails among nearly all the contributors is summed up byAnne McNaughton: ‘you bend your energies to understanding the function of a theatricallyforeign convention, and then set about making it work for yourselves and your audience’ (148).Articles by Sharon D. Voros and Barbara Mujica take different stagings of Larson’stranslation into account in their sensitive readings of Zayas’ Traicion, while CatherineBoyle uses performance in translation to ‘reflect upon the gender implications of the dramaticspace in which Sor Juana sets Los empenos de una casa (179). Most interesting among thesearticles is Jonathan Thacker’s description of how an updated production in translation ofTirso’s La venganza de Tamar permitted a more daring*and ultimately moreconvincing*interpretation than scholarly approaches. All of these articles suggestchallenging settings for familiar plays, but Ben Gunter’s radical reimagining of Cervantes’La eleccion de los alcaldes de Daganzo for a children’s theatre workshop seems more thanwrongheaded (108). The article simply does not provide a context to understand how it mightbe appropriate to have schoolchildren referring to ‘kikes’ and ‘wops’ in a play they believed tobe by Cervantes.

A final group of articles provides fascinating insight into the work of directors. MichaelHalberstam describes how he staged a successful production of Matthews’ Spite for Spite in atheatre measuring just over forty-five square metres. McNaughton explains how she foundpractical solutions to staging, research, casting, scoring and so on. Isaac Benabu explains howto direct in the absence of stage directions, reconstructing his reading process and itsimplications for blocking.

The book also documents, through omission, the fact that no one is staging interludes.Cervantes’ entremeses, for example, are quite rightly treated as magnificent plays but,perhaps unfairly, not as functional interludes. This is curious because instead of polymetry,one might just as easily think of generic variety as the sine qua non of Spanish classicaltheatre. Audiences, several authors noted, object to the comedias’ ‘obsession with honour andchastity’; this could be addressed, it would seem, with the gleeful cuckoldry so often portrayed


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in entremeses (246). The fact that Halberstam found it necessary to begin performances byexplaining ‘a few tidbits of information’ to his audience, itself a kind of loa, further suggeststhe potential utility of works of teatro breve (139).

This very small cavil aside, the book’s variety of perspectives coupled with the quality ofthe articles, make this a work worthy of attention by anyone with an interest in the currentstate of the comedia in the Anglophone world, whether in Spanish or English translation.

JOHN SLATER

University of Colorado.

Bringing the First Latin-American Opera to Life: Staging ‘La purpura de la rosa’ inSheffield. Edited by Jane W. Davidson and Anthony Trippett. Durham ModernLanguages Series 2007. Durham: School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Universityof Durham. 2007. 386 pp.

Escrita en 1659 con ocasion del anuncio del enlace entre Luis XIV y Marıa Teresa de Austria,hija de Felipe IV, y con el transfondo polıtico de la Paz de los Pirineos, La purpura de la rosa esuna de las dos unicas obras de Calderon de la Barca que constituyen ‘toda una comediacantada’*siendo la otra Celos aun del aire matan, que es descrita como una ‘fiesta cantada’ enla Septima parte de comedias del celebre poeta espanol don Pedro Calderon de la Barca(Madrid: Juan Sanz, 1715). La pieza, representada por primera vez el 17 de enero de 1660 enel Coliseo del Buen Retiro de Madrid con musica*hoy perdida*de Juan Hidalgo, serıaescenificada en la Penınsula al menos en dos ocasiones mas*1679 y 1680*antes de serpresentada en Lima en 1701 como una ‘representacion musica’*segun reza el manuscritooriginal*durante las celebraciones por el decimoctavo cumpleanos y primer ano del reinadode Felipe V, corriendo la partitura de la obra a cargo del espanol afincado en Peru, Tomas deTorrejon y Velasco.

Las expresiones ‘comedia cantada’, ‘fiesta cantada’, ‘representacion musica’ o, incluso,‘zarzuela’*vocablo este ultimo que tiene un papel central en la Loa introductoria del texto de1659, si bien no en la creada para la representacion de Lima de 1701*son importantes a lahora de entender tanto la tradicion dramatica y musical en la que se inscribe el texto deCalderon y su recepcion en America como el libro que nos ocupa ya que, si hay un termino queno se utiliza durante el siglo XVII para este tipo de producciones, es el de ‘opera’, palabra que,como Lawrence-King destaca en este mismo volumen, se utiliza en Espana desde 1638 enreferencia ‘not to a theatrical or musical genre, but to an ensemble of French musicians’ (77).Ası, al utilizar dicho termino en su tıtulo, Bringing the First Latin-American Opera to Life:Staging ‘La purpura de la rosa’ in Sheffield probablemente crea mas confusion de la necesaria.Mientras que es facil entender la version de La purpura de la rosa de Torrejon y Velascodentro de la tradicion de fiestas o comedias cantadas*o con amplio acompanamientomusical*que se dan en el teatro virreinal o en las celebraciones publicas de la Lima delsiglo XVII y XVIII, al tildarla como la ‘primera opera latinoamericana’ el lectornecesariamente se pregunta por las conexiones con una tradicion musical ydramaturgica*fundamentalmente italiana, pero tambien francesa*que no existe en esaepoca en la Ciudad de los Reyes. Ante ello, la unica solucion es decir, como hace el yamencionado Lawrence-King, que ‘Purpura is opera, but not as we know it’ (146) poniendo elacento al hacerlo en la forma en como se han construido tradicionalmente las relaciones entremusica y teatro.

Dejando de lado la cuestion no baladı de la historia conceptual y terminologica que seesconde detras de su tıtulo, Bringing the First Latin-American Opera to Life es un libroapasionante en muchos sentidos y fruto de una gran ambicion intelectual. Constituye unintento colectivo de reflexionar desde distintos angulos sobre una experiencia ‘total’: la de


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como producir y dar vida a la version de Torrejon y Velasco de La purpura de la rosa conestudiantes universitarios no profesionales en el marco de la colaboracion entre elDepartamento de Estudios Hispanicos y el Departamento de Musica de la Universidad deSheffield, representados respectivamente por Anthony Trippett y Jane W. Davidson, quienesejercen ademas de editores de este volumen. Tratandose de un proyecto universitario, uno deesos angulos es logicamente el pedagogico. En este sentido, los analisis de Jane W. Davidson,Anthony Trippett, Simon Fidler y el segundo de los dos artıculos de Andrew Lawrence-King(‘La musica de dos orbes’) constituyen una rica y extraordinaria narracion*triunfalista enalgunos aspectos y provocativa en la mayorıa de ellos*sobre las vicisicitudes, cambios yapuestas que hubo que afrontar y realizar a lo largo de todo el proyecto tanto en cuestionesrelacionadas con la obra como con sus participantes, ası como sobre los*necesariamentecambiantes*objetivos de aprendizaje que subyacıan al proyecto general (Trippett) y a lasiempre complicada tarea de dirigir la puesta en escena (Davidson), la musica (Lawrence-King) o los ensayos (Fidler).

Por su parte, tanto el artıculo de Anthony Heathcote como el primero de los textos deAndrew Lawrence-King (‘Una musica entre otra’) resultan cruciales a la hora de dilucidar elcontexto artıstico, musical y literario de La purpura de la rosa. Siguiendo el camino abiertopor estudiosos del teatro y la musica del siglo de oro como Louise K. Stein, ambos logran dar alvolumen una gran profundidad historica*complementando la introduccion a la epocarealizada para este volumen por Paul Jordan*y contribuyen a insertar la obra de Calderony la musica de Torrejon y Velasco dentro de las tradiciones musicales espanolas y, porextension, del mundo hispanico a la vez que ponen dicho conocimiento, particularmente en elcaso de Lawrence-King, al servicio de decisiones dramaticas y musicales concretas. Si acaso, lounico que se echa a faltar es mas informacion sobre la vida musical y dramatica de la capitaldel Virreinato de Peru.

Por ultimo, Nicholas G. Round y Patricia Martınez�Zapico ofrecen en sus aportaciones alvolumen no solo una propuesta de traduccion del texto al ingles*llevada a cabo por el primerode ambos autores*, sino una reflexion sobre los problemas que conllevan traducir a Calderon(Round) y el empleo de subtıtulos durante la representacion (Martınez�Zapico).

Como colofon al ingente esfuerzo puesto tanto en el proyecto como en la creacion del libro,Bringing the First Latin-American Opera to Life viene acompanado de un DVD que incluye,ademas de fragmentos de los ensayos y la representacion, entrevistas con los distintosparticipantes*profesores y estudiantes*y permite seguir de manera audiovisual todo el viajeeducativo, intelectual y personal que dio lugar a la puesta en escena de tan singular obra.

JOSE RAMON JOUVE MARTIN

McGill University, Montreal.

VERONICA GROSSI, Sigilosos v(u)elos epistemologicos en Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert. 2007. 187 pp.

Veronica Grossi’s Sigilosos v(u)elos epistemologicos en Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz examinesthree of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s (1648�95) most complicated works: El divino Narciso,Primero sueno, and Neptuno alegorico. Her analysis is highly theoretical but very reader-friendly and necessary for a solid base and interrelated interpretation of these intricate works.Grossi also gives a nod to the relationship between these principal texts and Sor Juana’sRespuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz and Carta atenagorica. Although Grossi adeptly managestheory, her main goal is to grant restitution to these writings and help readers understandthem within their cultural context as well as in Grossi’s theoretical apparatus. Also, theappendix of the prosification of the Explicacion del arco ‘Neptuno alegorico’ will be of greathelp to those who wish to examine and dissect this complicated text.


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In Grossi’s introduction, she clearly states her goals that fall into a cultural studiesre-evaluation of Sor Juana’s work. She carefully defines her terms, and herinterdisciplinary approach includes rhetorical, semiotic, intertextual, political, artistic,cultural, allegorical and ideological elements. Then, in Chapter 1, Grossi describes howSor Juana’s texts pertain to and, at the same time, add uniqueness to the alreadydistinctive literature of the American Baroque. Sor Juana creates her own literary spacewithin the socio-literary and hegemonic political order of her time. Grossi presents thesocio-political components of the Respuesta and Primero sueno and indicates their similarpurposes. She suggests that Sor Juana’s acts of daring, both internal and external to thesetexts, are models for empowerment and confirm the limitless possibilities of creating newimaginary spaces that expand limits even under confining circumstances. For Sor Juana,solitary spaces can become places of creative expression against an overpoweringdominance.

Grossi’s analysis of the Loa para el divino Narciso in Chapter 2 is multifaceted, and, asin other chapters, Grossi shows Sor Juana’s subversion of imperial discourse. She locatesthe loa in the theatrical production of the time. With a background of sacramental theatrethat presents clearly demarcated ‘truths’, the loa emerges as ‘un texto dinamico, plurıvoco,abierto al libre debate entre diferentes interpretaciones’ (49). Grossi also integrates anotherimportant but rarely studied area in Chapter 2: finezas and how Sor Juana incorporatesthis term in the three examined works. Typically, discussions on finezas are limited to SorJuana’s Carta atenagorica but Grossi synthesizes how finezas function in other works.Grossi suggests that it is not Sor Juana’s act of defining or analysing finezas that makesher unique, but that in doing so Sor Juana pursues the act of argumentation and debate.Continuing with El divino Narciso, the auto sacramental that follows the loa, Grossidedicates Chapter 3 to mythology, allegory (both human and divine) and female figurespresent in it. She also explains its intertextuality with the Primero sueno. Grossi againreturns to Sor Juana’s acts of daring and signals how they become rewarded in the Mexicannun’s literary production and how Sor Juana’s presentation of various, multifaceted voiceswithin Divino Narciso, like the loa that precedes it, serves to destabilize biblical absoluteauthority.

Chapter 4 is perhaps the best and worst chapter of all because it leaves readers wantingmore. Certain parts masterfully dissect the Neptuno alegorico and Primero sueno and showSor Juana’s ‘ingenio artıstico femenino que situa a la creadora por encima de toda jerarquıainstitucional, aun divinizada’ (102). Grossi not only highlights Sor Juana’s special(dis)advantage as a female but she suggests that Sor Juana uses other (dis)advantages toheighten her unique literary contribution. Sor Juana’s femininity is not the only factor thataids her production of masterful literature but also her extreme intelligence. Very few otherscould have created the texts that Sor Juana produced.

Chapters 5 and 6 revisit all three texts to signal other elements that transfer from onetext to another such as the role of fantasy or imagination. While Grossi admits that aconclusive exegesis is impossible, in Chapter 6 she strongly hints that Sor Juana’s prowess asa writer is due in large part to her femaleness, and while I agree that Sor Juana’s sex does puther in a position that other canonical writers of her time did not enjoy, it is not only her sexthat makes Sor Juana distinct. On the other hand, in the book as a whole, Grossi underscoresthat Sor Juana’s arguments go beyond sex and that Sor Juana’s experience causes her toselect certain symbolic arguments that others would have neglected. Through the thoroughanalysis of these three texts, Grossi’s readers will not only expand their understanding ofthese complex works, but they will be able to transfer the benefits of Grossi’s analysis to otherSorjuanine texts as well.

GRADY C. WRAY

University of Oklahoma.


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SERGIO RIVERA-AYALA, El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos. Espacio, cuerpo ypoder. Coleccion Tamesis. Serie A: Monografıas 270. Woodbridge: Tamesis. 2009. 221 pp.

Este texto se inscribe dentro de los estudios sobre la conquista de America que analizan lamanera en que el discurso da forma a la realidad. Edmundo O’Gorman y Jose Rabasa habıananalizado ya las implicaciones del lenguaje con el cual se creo (‘se invento’, en el vocabulario deO’Gorman) la imagen de una America que precisaba la conquista y explotacion. Lasaportaciones de Rivera-Ayala radican en el enfasis con que estudia la construccion delcuerpo y del genero de los americanos.

Otro aspecto importante del libro es la investigacion sobre el papel que las tradicioneshelenıstica y medieval tuvieron en la produccion de distintos puntos claves del imaginario entorno a America. Aristoteles y sus obras figuran prominentemente a lo largo de los primeroscapıtulos. La atencion tanto a la produccion crıtica norteamericana, como a la latinoamericanaes otro rasgo que vale la pena mencionar ya que no es una practica comun. El primer capıtulo(son cinco, mas una introduccion y unas breves conclusiones), ‘Monstruos, cinocefalos ycanıbales’, presenta el legado ideologico grecolatino y medieval de los europeos que llegaron aAmerica. Componente central de esta ideologıa era la concepcion de que la conducta moral y laconstitucion fısica de los seres humanos estaban ligadas al clima en que habitaban. Una citade Margaret Hodgen respecto a la relacion entre el poco realismo de los relatos antropologicosmedievales y las necesidades militares de sus productores (38), permea estas paginas repletasde monstruos y seres fantasticos de la primera etapa de la colonizacion americana. Ladiferencia planteada por el bestiario suscitado por la experiencia americana radica, comoconcuerda Rivera-Ayala con Claude Rawson, en el hecho de que el termino canıbalconstituyera una categorıa etnica geograficamente localizada y delimitada (50�52).

‘El cuerpo americano en Colon y Vespucci’ analiza como los textos de Colon en el caso delcuerpo masculino, y los de Vespucci en el del femenino, son centrales en la configuracion deuna serie de caracterısticas vinculadas con los americanos: vulnerabilidad, docilidad y pocavirilidad de los hombres; un apetito sexual desbordado y el canibalismo de las mujeres. ‘Laciudad de Mexico y el paisaje urbano’ estudia la transformacion del discurso colonial ante unmedio urbano que una vez destruido durante la guerra de conquista, propone la continuidadentre un espacio ideal (urbs) y un orden social igualmente ideal (civitas) (94). Esta armonıa,leıda en Mexico en 1554 de Cervantes de Salazar, es alcanzada a traves de la distribucion en elespacio de formas de conducta que regulaban el comportamiento de acuerdo al genero y algrupo etnico al que se perteneciera.

‘ ‘‘Alboroto y motın’’ de la Grandeza mexicana’ yuxtapone las dos obras aludidas por el tıtulo ysenala como los cambios ocurridos en la poblacion entre el principio y el final del siglo XVII hacenque para 1692 el supuesto ideal ‘bucolico y pastoral’ de la obra de Bernardo de Balbuena (135) nopueda enmascarar mas la explotacion colonial que aparece, de pronto, en el relato de Siguenza yGongora, quien sin embargo, despolitiza el motın y lo transforma en un problema moral (156). Eneste capıtulo, que tambien presta atencion a la distribucion de papeles de acuerdo a genero yetnicidad, los criollos, en la figura de Siguenza, se erigen como mediadores e interpretes entre elpoder imperial y los indıgenas. Si el papel de los criollos en este capıtulo es ambiguo, en ‘El espaciodieciochesco o la ‘‘reconquista’’ de America’ la ‘reconquista’ tiene en varios intelectuales criollos,pero sobre todo en Clavijero, un paladın en la lucha mantenida, por un lado, contra cientıficos eintelectuales europeos que sostenıan la inferioridad de America y; por otro, contra lospeninsulares y las medidas que al interior de las colonias antagonizaban a los criollos.

Lo interesante de Clavijero radica, segun Rivera-Ayala, en que utilizaba a la razon mismapara mostrar los errores de los europeos. Si este capıtulo final da una nota positiva allibro*por primera vez los americanos responden y exhiben el caracter altamente interesadodel saber europeo*las conclusiones, que recuerdan la continuada lucha contra la explotacion,indirectamente presentan desde una perspectiva mas negativa el proyecto criollo de erigirseen autoridad respecto al archivo historico y la realidad latinoamericana.


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Rivera-Ayala hace aportaciones importantes respecto a los temas que se fueron reciclando(como el determinismo climatico) en formaciones ideologicas distintas que permitieron lacontinuada explotacion de America y los americanos. Un aspecto que extrana, sin embargo, escierta falta de atencion a las citas y el analisis del discurso. El autor podrıa haber hecho masen este aspecto para hacer justicia al tema del libro: la importancia de analizar detenidamentelos discursos del poder.

IVONNE DEL VALLE

University of California, Berkeley.

Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World. Edited by Liam MatthewBrockey. Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650�2000. Aldershot: Ashgate.2008. 298 pps.

As an appreciation grows in scholarly circles for the Portuguese as pioneers of global culturalinteraction, Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World comes as a welcomeaddition to the English-language historical literature on this subject. Editor Liam Brockeyand his contributing authors have produced an exceptionally useful and insightful book thatdraws out important themes in comparative colonial studies by examining sundry Portuguese-held port cities in Brazil, east and west Africa, coastal western India, southern China andJapan. What emerges is a picture of remarkable cultural and institutional consistency acrossPortuguese colonial cities around the world, brought about by a common language, but also bycommon religious, administrative and military forms. The book underscores the path-breaking and globally interconnected nature of the Lusophone maritime empire, showingthat outposts that may appear to have been geographically peripheral were actuallyintegrated into a deliberate, distinctively Portuguese imperial system.

The present volume is the product of a conference held at Princeton University in 2004;Brockey assembled a core of highly knowledgeable scholars whose work focuses on widelyseparated regions of the Lusophone world. Brockey’s stated goal was to ask: ‘What is thenature of the relationship between [colonial] city and empire?’ (8). The product of thisintellectual exercise has been to recognize and present Portuguese colonial port cities as‘nodes of empire’*hybrid satellite communities far from the metropole wherein thePortuguese fostered their imperial, ecclesiastical and commercial activities, but from whichconsistent Portuguese cultural products (language, religion, architecture, law) weredisseminated to surrounding regions.

Brockey asserts that ‘The organization of this volume is the product of a conscious desire todepart from the traditional manner of presenting research on the Portuguese Empire’ (11). Thatis, his aim was not to see the empire’s structure and function from the standpoint of its imperialplanners and rulers in Lisbon, but instead from the perspective of each individual colonial port,in order to better realize the importance of local social, commercial and political contexts. In thisthe contributors succeed, providing novel insights to the diverse administrative challenges thePortuguese faced as colonizers. The work is divided thematically into three sections: ‘Religionand Empire’; ‘Cities and Commerce’; and ‘Politics of Empire’. The subtle logic of these groupingsworks well in fleshing out the complexities of cross-cultural development in varied imperialregions, but the book’s architecture has a loose yet effective geographic and chronologicaldesign, too; chapters in each section reinforce one another by providing comparative examplesfor readers to contemplate.

One of the strengths of this book is that, due to its broad sweep, it will be of great interestto readers who are not exclusively Lusophone specialists. Each chapter effectively embeds asingle colonial base within its particular region, highlighting the issues peculiar to the diversecultures wherein the Portuguese established their toe-hold global empire. Thus, specialists in


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Africa, Latin America, South Asia and China will do well to consider the multiple visions ofthe Portuguese imperial model discussed here*an empire that, due to a paucity of nationalresources, was compelled to become interlaced with and rely on indigenous social, political andeconomic structures in order to subsist and endure.

The fact that every city considered in this work is a seaport is significant and telling. Porttowns and hinterlands are by their nature multi-lateral permeable frontier zones wherecultures meet and blend, diffusing ideas or practices into one another. The chapters in thisbook underscore that Portuguese colonial cities remained contested spaces long after nominal‘conquest’. The Portuguese colonial experience was defined by the negotiated balance createdwith indigenous peoples in the urban areas they occupied or built in various parts of the globe.This work will help historians to understand the striking resilience of the Portuguesepresence, and the longevity of their cultural impact, even in areas where their direct politicalinfluence waned centuries ago.

For all its strengths, the book is not without fault. Many of the chapters focus on regionalports and hinterlands that are unfamiliar territory to most western readers, so the volumewould have benefited from the addition of detailed historical maps to contextualize theabundant geographical references encountered in the text. (The volume does include beautifulcontemporary Portuguese illustrations of the fortified urban spaces under consideration, butthese lack the scope necessary to represent ties with surrounding regions or the geographicalrelationship to other Portuguese colonies.) Then, too, there is the problem in some chapters ofemploying un-translated Portuguese terms, a practice that will certainly confuse readers notfluent in the language of Camoes. Similarly, an appended table or note explaining relativecontemporary currency values would assist readers unfamiliar with transactions conducted inarchaic xerafins or patacas.

Finally, while the publisher’s need to contain the book’s ultimate size is clear, the lack of acomprehensive treatment of Malacca and Ormuz*key component ports of the earlyPortuguese seaborne imperial system*is difficult to understand, for surely these strategicmaritime choke points were also thriving ‘nodes of empire’ of critical importance. However,since Brockey asserts that Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World was intendedto inspire new research, we may hope that scholars will soon consider Malacca and Ormuzusing the incisive ‘nodes of empire’ model, as well.

TIMOTHY D. WALKER

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

PATRICK O’FLANAGAN, Port Cities of Atlantic Iberia, c.1500�1900. Aldershot: Ashgate.2008. xvii�331 pp.

Many branches of the social sciences are taking a fresh look at their common roots in trying tounderstand the global economy that developed in the aftermath of European voyages ofexploration. To approach that vast topic, scholars from diverse disciplines must attempt tomaster the published work and interpretive challenges of many interconnected fields ofhistorical study. One unfortunate result of such a daunting undertaking is the temptation totake shortcuts, privileging the most comprehensive overviews in unfamiliar fields, whilepaying due attention to nuance in one’s own specialization. For the most part, that is not thecase with the book under review. The author has made a heroic effort to evaluate the debatesin a wide range of historical fields. The attempt deserves praise and admiration, though it ishardly surprising that his reach sometimes exceeds his grasp.

A distinguished geographer, O’Flanagan has spent much of his career studying theIberian Peninsula, developing a deep understanding of its varied and difficult topography andecology. Here he examines the changing fortunes of major port cities in Atlantic Iberia over


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the course of four centuries, aiming to explain and evaluate the effects of state policies onthose ports. For Spain, he focuses on the south-western region that included inland Sevilleand its dependent ports along the Guadalquivir River to Sanlucar de Barrameda, and the rivalport complex of Cadiz and the minor ports around its bay. Seville held the official monopoly oftrade to Spain’s American empire from 1503 until 1717. Cadiz held the monopoly from 1717until 1778 and the advent of free-trade policies for the Americas. For Portugal, Lisbon in thesouth was the unchallenged ‘metropole’ from the fifteenth century, with Oporto in the northgaining prominence only with the rise of the wine trade in the eighteenth century.

The book is much broader than its title would suggest. The author considers the hinterlandsfeeding people, goods and services into the ports of each region and tracks changes over time.Throughout the analysis, he gives due credit to works of scholarship in a variety of fields, addinghis voice to ongoing debates about the productive capacity of the land, the ups and downs ofpopulation, and the role of the state, among other interpretive issues. Overall, the authorpresents the state as a predatory presence in the commercial world of the ports, both in Portugaland in Spain. This approach follows the established historiography, but it leads to a verylimited understanding of the complex relationships that bound commercial, political andentrepreneurial interests together during the early centuries of globalized trade. Commercialprofits would have been higher with little or no taxation, and subsidiary ports might haveprospered in the absence of official monopolies, but both taxes and monopolies helped to financeprotection for transatlantic fleets and to thwart foreign incursions into the Americas.

The full context for the history of Iberian port cities requires a consideration ofinternational affairs, both in Europe and in the European empires in the Americas. As it is,political developments are largely absent from the book’s main argument, though they clearlyaffected the fortunes of Iberian port cities over time. Also largely absent are the ports of Ibero-America, which included not only the Atlantic coast but also the Pacific. Critics of the conceptof Atlantic history continually remind us that it cannot be separated from oceanic history as awhole. That is true, though it is unfair to expect every piece of serious scholarship to be globalin scope. None the less, this reviewer would have welcomed more nuanced attention to theAmerican dimension of transatlantic trade. The few generalizations made about Ibero-America are so broad as to be highly misleading.

The notes appear as parenthetical inclusions in the text, without specific page references.That can suffice for most readers, but some would undoubtedly prefer the precise referencesstandard among historians. The criteria for bibliographic references are not clear; books byKagan and Elliott, originally published in English, appear only in Spanish translation,whereas a book by Perez-Mallaına, originally published in Spanish, appears only in Englishtranslation. The work as a whole would have benefited from more careful proofreading.Typographical errors abound. A sampling of misspelled names in the text, the bibliography, orthe notes includes Elliott, Kuethe, Perez-Mallaına, Runyan and Wyngaerde. Misspelled orinconsistent place names include Cartagena de Indias, Zorroza, Gijon/Xixon/Xijon, Guipuzcoa/Gipuzcoa, Viscaya/Biskaia/Vizcaya and Passajes/Pasajes. The variations in place names stemfrom usage in modern Spanish autonomous communities, but they are inconsistent. This willconfuse readers who are not already expert in Iberian history*in other words, the veryreaders for whom this book will be most valuable.

Despite these criticisms, this is an important piece of scholarship that makes a valiantattempt to understand and conceptualize a huge topic. It is well illustrated with dozens ofsketches, tables, maps and city plans, some in colour. Scholars from a variety of disciplines inthe social sciences will learn much from its pages.

CARLA RAHN PHILLIPS

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.


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MARIA ISABEL LOPEZ MARTINEZ, La mujer ante el espejo: un motivo literario y artıstico.With a Foreword by Wesley J. Weaver III. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The EdwinMellen Press. 2008. vi�181 pp.

La monografıa de Marıa Isabel Lopez Martınez que aquı resenamos examina el motivo de lamujer ante el espejo en un muestrario de textos pertenecientes a la literatura, la pintura y elcine que abarca desde el siglo XVIII hasta la actualidad. Desde un punto de vistametodologico, la autora se apoya ocasionalmente en corrientes crıticas como la tematologıa,la narratologıa, el feminismo y el psicoanalisis, al par que adopta una optica comparatista queengloba diferentes tradiciones occidentales*siendo la espanola la que tiene mayor incidencia.La narrativa realista del siglo XIX ocupa asimismo un lugar destacado, razon que se atribuyea la importante presencia de la autocontemplacion femenina en las novelas de dicho perıodo.

Despues de una introduccion que delimita los objetivos del libro, lascinco seccionesposteriores se ordenan por epocas y generos. El capıtulo 1 se centra en la narrativadecimononica europea a partir de una serie de pasajes de Victor Hugo, Charlotte Bronte,Leo Tolstoi, Gustave Flaubert, Jose Maria Eca de Queiros, Benito Perez Galdos, LeopoldoAlas, Pedro Antonio de Alarcon y Vicente Blasco Ibanez. El capıtulo 2 se dedicaespecıficamente a Juan Valera, uno de los representantes mas conspicuos de la novelaespanola del ultimo cuarto del siglo XIX que compagino su faceta de creador con la de crıticoliterario. En el capıtulo 3 se presta atencion a la novelıstica del siglo pasado, en especial lasescritoras de la posguerra y la democracia espanolas entre las que figuran Ana Marıa Matute,Merce Rodoreda, Carmen Conde, Josefina Aldecoa, Carmen Martın Gaite, Carmen Posadas ySoledad Puertolas. En el capıtulo 4 se pasa de la narrativa a la lırica, incluyendose diferentesregistros que van desde el neoclasicismo de Juan Melendez Valdes a poetas actuales comoJenaro Talens y Ana Rosetti. La literatura deja paso a las artes visuales en el capıtulo 5, con lamencion de pintores y directores cinematograficos que, aun con la disparidad de sus gustos,comparten la fascinacion por la imagen de la mujer ante el espejo. El libro se cierra con unaconclusion que hace hincapie en la perennidad de un motivo que no solo perdura mas alla de lasucesion de escuelas y movimientos, sino que trasciende tambien las fronteras existentes entrelos generos.

La nomina de autores a los que recurre Marıa Isabel Martınez acentua el enfoquecomparatista del libro, revelando su eficacia al apuntalar el caracter a un tiemposupranacional y multidisciplinario del tema que constituye el proposito del estudio. Hay quelamentar, sin embargo, que tal despliegue de erudicion no venga acompanado de un analisisque permita dilucidar la dialectica entre lo uno y lo diverso caracterıstica de cualquier motivo.Dicho en otras palabras, se echa de menos una fundamentacion solida acerca de losmecanismos retoricos y los contextos culturales que servirıan de base a la plasmacionartıstica de la mujer ante el espejo, tanto en lo referente al plano diacronico como a supresencia simultanea en una pluralidad de generos. A modo de ejemplo, de la lectura del librono se desprende hasta que punto el realismo decimononico y la narrativa femenina de lasegunda mitad del siglo XX abordan un motivo identico desde unos supuestos ideologicosopuestos, fruto a la vez de una coyuntura social que poco tiene que ver de una centuria a laotra. Lo mismo cabe decir de la comparacion entre la novela y el cine en terminos dediscursividad o diegesis: ¿como expresar en imagenes la minuciosidad de que hace gala elescritor realista en la descripcion de la heroına sentada delante de un espejo?; o al reves, ¿queestrategias narrativas permite el cinematografo que serıan inviables en la novela?

Lejos de contribuir a la unidad del conjunto, la acumulacion de pasajes o escenas en uncapıtulo se resuelve en un escueto comentario de cada uno que a la larga resultainsatisfactorio por su precariedad. Como las muestras podrıan multiplicarse ad infinitum,uno se pregunta que sentido tiene ir amontonando citas cuyo examen resulta casi siempreparcial e incompleto. Por si lo anterior no bastara, se concede a la narrativa un espaciomuchısimo mayor que a las demas artes, con un total de 140 paginas del total. Ello contrasta


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con las once paginas de que consta el capıtulo sobre la lırica y las nueve dedicadasconjuntamente a la pintura y el cine. Ni que decir tiene que tal desequilibrio atenta contrala pretension de establecer unos mınimos parametros que indaguen en el motivo desde unaoptica multidisciplinaria, tal como se anuncia en el subtıtulo. Pese al desideratum de la autorade no ‘perderse en vericuetos de cifras y de celulas’ al objeto de ‘extraer conclusiones quedesenreden algun entramado del tejido’ (8), lo cierto es que al final el lector se extravıa en unaprofusion de arboles que en ningun momento dejan ver el bosque.

TONI DORCA

Macalester College, Minnesota.

An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry from Spain. In EnglishTranslation with Original Text. Edited by Anna-Marie Aldaz. Translated by Anna-Marie Aldaz and W. Robert Walker. MLA Texts & Translations. New York: The ModernLanguage Association of America. 2009. 307 pp.

Not so long ago it could happen that general surveys of nineteenth-century Spanish literaturemight mention only one woman poet: Rosalıa de Castro. More recently the works of CarolinaCoronado, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda and many other female poets have surfaced fromobscurity, but in this collection Anna-Marie Aldaz and her co-translator make poems bytwenty-one women available, not only to those who can read Spanish but also to those whoneed an English translation as a bridge to the original. Verses in Catalan and Galician areincluded and here the English version may be helpful even to readers familiar with Castilian.Even now, as these figures emerge from the mist of neglect, there are still some facts invitingfurther research, such as the dates of the birth and death of Eduarda de Moreno Morales, forinstance.

The preliminary material is substantial. Providing an introductory background to theanthology, Susan Kirkpatrick points out that in eighteenth-century Spain fewer than ten percent of women were literate according to estimates and that, even when literacy rates rose inthe nineteenth century, Ferdinand VII’s repression of the press hampered publication ingeneral (xiv). The surge in the appearance of women’s work in print from the 1840s onwardsreflects, we are reminded, the influence of Romanticism with its belief in the validity of theimagination and of expressing emotion. Another factor was the growth of the liberal reform,emphasizing the right of self-expression. Women, singing as naturally as birds do, should beallowed to make their voices heard (xiii).

Before turning to the poems selected, each prefaced by a page of biography, it is useful tohave in mind Susan Kirkpatrick’s reminder of how strong the prevailing attitude was in Spainthat ‘literary women’ were a threat to society’s fundamental order, with its hierarchicalrelationship between men and women. Looking at the biographical sketches we see, forinstance, that Concepcion Estevarena had to disobey her father’s implicit order that sheshould not write poetry (283), and that other women, such as Robustiana Armino (145�51) andAmalia Fenollosa (161�60) gave up writing when they married.

The volume’s attractive cover has a reproduction of a contemporary painting, the Alegorıade la poesıa by Santiago Rusinol, depicting a woman in a flower-filled garden*an idealillustration to match the predominantly lyrical verse within the covers. The introductionhighlights the constraint on women poets to conform to contemporary ideas of acceptablefemininity, with woman as a ‘domestic angel’, ‘a maternal, altruistic, sexless, sensitive, andspiritual (or in Spain, devout) figure’ (xvi). The anthology shows this model for women’s versestarting to disappear towards the end of the century, with Rosalıa de Castro spear-heading theevolution. There is a splendid note of indignant rebellion in ‘¡Poetisa . . .!’ (278�81), by RosarioAcuna, the first woman to address Madrid’s all-male Ateneo in 1884.


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The list of works consulted includes translations by other hands and also studies of thetheory and practice of translation. As regards the daunting task of providing English versionsof the selected works, even the shortest poem in this anthology would surely have fuelled anhour’s animated discussion in a translators’ seminar. The editorial ‘Notes on the Translation’is clear about ‘the difficult*many would say impossible*task of translating poetry. [ . . .] wewere guided by the notion that the best translation of a poem is another poem, which, ideallywould flow smoothly in English but without deviating too much from the original’s essentialform and content’ (xxxvii); ‘[ . . .] our attempt has been to capture the original quaintnesswithout sounding outmoded’ (xxxix). The aim, then, has not been to reproduce the nineteenth-century English of Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Emily Bronte. ‘Doctorona’ becomes ‘smartypants’ in Marıa Josefa Massanes’ ‘La resolucion’ (8). When it seems appropriate, thetranslators are not afraid to transpose lines, so that Carolina Coronado’s stanza beginning‘El campo tristeza ofrece/y la ciudad enfados/tedio inspira’ becomes ‘The city offers/boredom;the country grief’ (110�11).

Whenever hitherto unknown works by women*whether in music, literature orart*emerge from obscurity, the point is also made that this aesthetic archaeological dig isonly worthwhile if the discoveries have innate value. In this carefully and thoroughlyproduced volume, Anna-Marie Aldaz has chosen her selection with discrimination,representing some poets by one work only, but others by a raft of examples. The themeswhich emerge include not only the expected flowers and passionate love*often exquisitelydealt with*but also more unusual subjects such a husband’s violence (‘El marido verdugo’[94�97]). Even a poem beginning with conventional thoughts about a child’s kiss takes anoriginal twist as the author is led to exploring in depth her longing for an embrace from herown dead mother (12�17).

As well as providing a panoramic view of the development of women’s verse throughoutthe nineteenth century, this volume will also be a source of pure pleasure for lovers of poetry.

MARGARET A. REES

Oxford.

AMELINA CORREA RAMON, Alejandro Sawa, luces de bohemia. Sevilla: Fundacion JoseManuel Lara. 2008. 320 pp.

Dr Amelina Correa Ramon has already established a deserved reputation for the rescue of so-called ‘minor’ literary figures from relative obscurity. Her magisterial and groundbreakingstudy of Isaac Munoz (Isaac Munoz (1881�1925): recuperacion de un escritor finisecular[Granada: Univ. de Granada, 1996]), of Amalia Domingo Soler (Cuentos espiritistas [Madrid:Clan Editorial, 2000]), of the minor writers of Andalusian modernismo (Poetas andaluces en laorbita de modernismo [Sevilla: Ediciones Alfar, 2001]), of Andalusian women writers (Plumasfemeninas en la literatura de Granada [siglos VIII�XX] [Granada: Univ. de Granada, 2002])and of Antonio de Zayas (Obra poetica [Sevilla: Fundacion Jose Manuel Lara, 2005]) are casesin point. What marks these studies, and the present under review, is Dr Correa’s unfailingolfato detectivesco in seeking out long-lost or overlooked facts, dates, letters, public records(the list of archives consulted for this study covers a whole page), newspaper articles, etc.,relevant to her subjects. As such she produces a fresh and more complete view of an authorand of a period. Thus her work has forced scholars of the fin de siglo to review their hoaryassumptions and conclusions concerning the nature and identity of literary productionbetween roughly 1880 and 1915. And Alejandro Sawa is just such a case, a writer whobestrode what now appears to be a little understood period where various literary trends werecompeting, interpenetrating and reshaping themselves to create the necessary climate for thatgreat leap forward which marks the emergence of the Spanish Symbolist-Decadence and


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European Modernism after 1902. In this study Dr Correa offers not only a definitive account ofthe life and works of Sawa but evidence for a necessary corrective to any literary history whichdivides writers into two antagonistic camps. Sawa, like most of his contemporaries, was afinisecular artist who stood between the changing obsessions of his age, from social commentto spiritual regeneration, from naturalismo radical to the artist as ‘sembrador de ideas’ andapostle of Art as the supreme value.

Sawa, as any student of the modern period will know, was immortalized in Valle-Inclan’sLuces de bohemia (1920) as Max Estrella, the blind Homeric figure who, as Sawa’sposthumous work, Iluminaciones en la sombra (1910) argues, ‘sees’ in his darkness thetragic nature and emptiness of the human condition. Sawa, as Emilio Carrere noted in 1918,was ‘la suprema consagracion de la capa bohemia’. Dr Correa gives substance to this tragicfigure and his bohemian milieu to show how Sawa was a key figure in a moment whereRealism, Naturalism, Decadence and Symbolism contended for space to produce a series ofcomplex forms which institutional literary histories have failed adequately to understand, letalone define. In this biography Dr Correa is concerned more with the life than the works givenher earlier study of the latter (Alejandro Sawa y el naturalismo literario [Granada: Univ. deGranada, 1993]). This is not to say that the literary merits of the novels are neglected, ratherthey are contextualized in the literary debates of the time.

The famed olfato detectivesco is more than apparent in the establishment of Sawa’s familytree. From parochial and census records the generational line from the union of AnastasioSabba Kirazoghu and Susana Malcochi in the 1770s through three generations to Alejandro’sbirth in Seville on 15 March 1862 is traced in detail. Anastasio left Smyrna (Turkey) to set upa merchant business in Seville, a company carried on by his sons and grandsons who moved toMalaga in 1870 and prospered. Alejandro’s precocious talent is demonstrated by his foundingof three literary reviews in 1877 and 1878, establishing himself at an early age in the literarycoteries of Malaga and meeting rising stars like Salvador Rueda. A testament to his precocioustalent and early instability is an extraordinary ‘encendido elogio’ (51) of Pope Pius IX whichshows an overly sensitive regard for his faith which was, predictably, soon to fade. Yet,strangely, he kept an engraving of the Pontiff with him until his death. But Malaga was toosmall: ‘¡Ir a Madrid, vivir en Madrid; no ser un oscuro provinciano!’ he wrote in 1887,expressing the desires of virtually all the major figures who were to come to fame in the late1890s. In the September of 1879, at the age of sixteen, he entered the fervent world of la vieboheme and the precarious life of a jobbing journalist. Soon, he had established his own ‘voice’,‘una voz vociferante y batalladora’. He became friends with the rising literary and journalisticstars of the moment: Joaquın Dicenta, Luis Parıs, Manuel Paso and columnists like JoseNakens and the aristocrat turned socialist, Rosario de Acuna. Sawa takes Daudet and Hugo ashis mentors and inclines towards the naturalism of Zola fed by the writings of Lombroso andMax Nordau. He joins the tertulias of what Pura Fernandez has termed naturalismo radicaland finds the support of its major proponent, Lopez Bago, who is to condition the first phase ofSawa’s literary career. In 1885 his first novel, La mujer de todo el mundo appeared, followedby five further successful novels, the last in 1888. If the early novels echo the prevailingconcerns with the biological sciences and medicine, social problems, private and publiccorruption and anticlericalism, subsequent works usher in what is to become, in the newcentury, with writers like Carrere, Llanas Aguilaniedo, Hoyos y Vinent and Munoz, theDecadence, ‘el arte como una nueva religion secularizada’. At the same time Sawa alsoanticipates that peculiarly fin de siglo belief in the messianic and socially regenerative powerof Art which obsessed the young writers across the divide of the two centuries. From Ganivetand Unamuno in the 1890s to Jimenez, Darıo, Bark, Azorın and Antonio Machado after 1900we find the belief that the artist alone can effect a social and, especially, a spiritual change.Sawa’s ‘trabajadores de la idea’ and his ‘sembradores de la idea’ is to be echoed by the writerscited above. In the same way he anticipated Jimenez’s essay ‘Rejas de oro’ (1900) when helaments the pervasive ‘falta de Ideal’.


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Sawa, arguably, is most well known (after Valle’s depiction of bohemian Madrid) for hissojourn in Paris and his introduction of the poems of Verlaine to the Madrid tertulias. His firstvisit seems to have been before 1885 (72). A second visit in 1889 introduced him to theauthentic barrio latino and the cradle of all that was new in literature and art. He metVerlaine, the Symbolists, Ruben Darıo and Gomez Carrillo, these latter soon to be thedisseminators of French culture to Spain. He also met the woman who was to be his wife,mother of a daughter and long-suffering companion: Jeanne Poirier. His precarious financeswere exacerbated, Dr Correa explains, not only by Sawa’s predilection for drugs and alcoholbut by his inveterate gambling. We learn that he visited the casino at Spa (Belgium)(Dr Correa discovers his carnet de socio) convinced he had discovered a foolproof system todefeat the tables. He even persuaded a gullible M. Tarible to part with his money. His returnto Madrid and collaborations in the periodical press mark his slow descent into blindness,acute penury and illness. His total impracticality for life and with money (he buys a dog on animpulse), his pleas to friends for help (callously ignored by Darıo and Benavente his erstwhilecompanions) and his long and lingering death (now immortalized in Luces de bohemia) aretraced in detail in this definitive account of the final agonies of this epitome of bohemianMadrid.

In this meticulous and superbly documented study Dr Correa offers not only a definitiveaccount of the life and works of Sawa but a necessary corrective to any literary history whichmight divide finisecular writers into two opposing literary attitudes: ’98 and modernismo.Sawa, like most of his contemporaries in this fecund period, was an artist who expresses theobsessions of the 1880s (naturalismo social y radical and early Decadence) and anticipatesthose of the early 1990s (simbolismo decadencia, the religion of Art and the belief that Art canoffer a national spiritual regeneration, ‘el artista como sembrador de ideas’). It is no surprisethat this biography won the Premio Antonio Domınguez Ortiz de Biografıas de 2008. It is anindispensable source for those who seek to understand more fully the Spanish literary fin desiglo.

RICHARD A. CARDWELL

University of Nottingham.

GARETH STOCKEY, Gibraltar: ‘A Dagger in the Spine of Spain?’. Brighton/Portland:Sussex Academic Press in collaboration with L’Institucio Alfons el Magnanim de Valenciaand the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies, London. 2009. xv�304pp.

Gareth Stockey’s book is the published version of his PhD on which he embarked as apostgraduate student at the University of Lancaster, under the auspices of the AHRC-fundedproject entitled ‘Community, Society and Identity in 19th- and 20th-Century Gibraltar’.Although it retains the overall feel of a doctoral dissertation with its forty-six pages offootnotes, it also benefits from the meticulousness which is the requirement of a successfulthesis.

The focus of the study is the frontier between Spain and Gibraltar and the fluctuations inthe relationship between the communities on both sides between 1900 and 1954. The author’s‘revisionist’ theses are threefold. First, that the relationship has been determined not only bypolitical events but also by the differing concerns of various class groups within Gibraltar andthe neighbouring Campo. Second, that the relationship was an increasingly close andsymbiotic one, which was broken neither by the Spanish Civil War nor by the evacuation ofmost of the population of Gibraltar during the Second World War, but by Franco’s politicalopportunism following the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Gibraltar in 1954 as part of herCoronation Tour and the subsequent border restrictions; these led not only to the destruction


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of the economic interdependence across the frontier and other forms of interaction (230), butalso to ‘the closure of hearts and minds’ (224). Third, during this period there was an inherent‘Spanishness’ in civilian Gibraltar, while the development of a distinctive Gibraltarianidentity only seriously arose after the 1950s (although he rightly concedes that it began toappear in the immediate aftermath of the War [183]).

The theses are successfully argued on the basis of thorough and detailed evidence fromboth primary and secondary sources. The primary sources were obtained from both Londonand Gibraltar, although there is no evidence of any attempt to access equivalent Spanishmaterial. The use of secondary sources is wide-ranging, almost comprehensive and includesmaterial in both Spanish and English, although again there is no evidence of the use ofnewspaper material in Spanish published outside Gibraltar itself.

One issue that arises from the study of the history of a British colony in isolation is that itis difficult to adjudge the extent to which some of the phenomena described are unique toGibraltar or are in fact paralleled elsewhere and are therefore typical of colonial or cross-border situations. For example, the author makes a strong case regarding the divide betweenthe ‘imported British community’ and the civilian population before the First World War andhe refers to the ‘barriers to entry’ being physical as well as social (22). But was this unique toGibraltar or a reflection of colonial life anywhere in the Empire at that time? Similarly, wasthe use of the Spanish language by both the moneyed and the working class in Gibraltartypical of any cross-border scenario? Was the general consensus ‘that there should be noreturn to the pre-war status quo of quasi-dictatorial rule by British officialdom, and amonopolisation of civilian representation in government by the self-interested [ . . .] elites’(187), echoed elsewhere in the colonies? Some wider contextualization of the Gibraltarexperience would have been enlightening.

In the closing chapter the author skims over the period 1954 to 1969 leading up to theclosure of the frontier and leaps from 1969 to 2006 in consecutive paragraphs (231). Althoughthe post-1954 period has been covered effectively by other writers (especially post-1969),Gareth Stockey’s book leaves the reader wondering whether the effects of Franco’s decision toclose the frontier in 1969 did in fact lead to what he calls the ‘quite possibly permanent’psychological divide which stands in marked contrast to relationships between 1923 and 1954(224). Unfortunately the author does not point the reader in the direction of the books andarticles that might help to answer that question.

The author generally writes well and the text flows smoothly for the most part. However,there are some stylistic infelicities, some of which could be attributed to poor editing, and anumber of statements are repeated unnecessarily (especially in Chapters 2 and 3). There are afew unfortunate lapses in proof-reading, the most significant of which spoils Franco’s famousquote that the Rock ‘was not worth a war’ (211). Referencing is generally excellent, but somefootnotes in Chapter 3 contain unnecessary and irritating ‘hereafter’ references not deemednecessary previously or subsequently.

PETER GOLD

University of the West of England, Bristol.

CARMEN CONDE, Mientras los hombres mueren. Edited, with an introduction, criticalanalysis, notes and vocabulary, by Jean Andrews. Manchester/New York: ManchesterUniversity Press. 2009. xi�175 pp.

Carmen Conde is not only a poet with a sizeable opus of more than two dozen separatecollections of poetry and numerous prose works, she is also an important figure in the literaryhistory of Spain. She was the first woman elected to the Spanish Royal Academy. Despitethese accomplishments, surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to her. Jean


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Andrews proposes to help rectify this neglect with her edition of Mientras los hombres mueren,prose poems Conde wrote during the Spanish Civil War, in Valencia between 1937 and 1939.Each poem is accompanied by a paragraph-by-paragraph, line-by-line commentary along witha mention, when applicable, of manuscript variations. The poetry is preceded by anintroduction and a select bibliography and is followed by a brief list of questions for classdiscussion and a short vocabulary section.

In her introduction, Andrews justifies the publication of these poems by making themrelevant to the current political efforts in Spain to remember its disastrous civil war, whichthe Franco regime misrepresented for decades and the subsequent democratic governmentintentionally disregarded in order to create a peaceful transition for the radical changesestablished after 1975. She then focuses on Carmen Conde’s long life of nearly ninety years.The emphasis placed on the Universidad Popular that she and her husband founded and onthe dangers that she faced when he was imprisoned after the war underscores the poet’svoluntary as well as involuntary sociopolitical engagement and also provides a meaningfulcontext for the reading of her war poems. Andrews comments on the formerly taboo subject ofConde’s lover, Amanda Junquera, but the longest part of her introductory remarks is devotedto Conde’s historic entry into the Academy. The limited bibliography provided includes notonly primary and secondary sources on Conde, but also a few suggested readings on theSpanish Civil War as well as on women’s writings and war memories in Spain.

This edition of Mientras los hombres mueren is based primarily on the two prepared byEmilio Miro and comprises not only her three dozen poems grouped under the title ‘Mientraslos hombres mueren’ but also the twenty-one poems labelled ‘A los ninos en la guerra’ thatbewail the fate of children and allude to her own child dead at birth. The poems from bothparts are laden with nightmarish images of death and destruction and resound with the criesof women and children suffering from terror and loss. The commentaries accompanying thepoems explicate each statement and probe the meaning of the metaphors, images, allusionsand lexicon. Considering the polysemic value of the poems, Andrews wisely offers multiple,possible interpretations for them.

With keen observational skill and scholarly insight, she disentangles ambiguous poeticimagery, explains deep meanings, and analyses the implications of the book’s thematics.Individual readers may question some of these suggestions as strained or doubtful. Forexample, one might wonder why the mere mention of wheat necessarily evokes Ceres or whytorches and eagles inevitably point to Fascist symbols. One might also doubt the overlyspecific reading of the ‘provincias del Duelo’ as a reference to the river Duero, given theexistence of more general allusions to the valley of death or to the Spanish expression thattranslates as ‘the valley of tears’. These interpretative excursions, however, reflect not somuch the critic’s error as her sensitivity and power of association. Andrews is veryknowledgeable about the literary, social and political history of Spain. She perceives manyreligious and mythological allusions in the poems, and she weaves into her analysesexplanations of the poet’s biography, of particular events of the Civil War, and ofappropriate aspects of Spain’s distant past. She also displays a notable familiarity withregional nomenclature and customs. All this specific information will certainly help studentsand general readers understand the broad cultural context in which these poems wereconceived. Andrews avoids leaving the impression of discrete, unrelated poems by carefullymaking constant references to previous poems, their imagery and themes. In this way thebook emerges as an organic, fluid whole. Her meticulous attention to detail is rarely marred,except for example in the poem beginning ‘Que no griten las serenas’, in which a typographicalerror converts a subjective form into an indicative one.

Because it belongs to the Hispanic Texts series of the University of Manchester, the book isdirected to the academic as well as the general reader and is meant for the classroom as well asfor scholarly reference. Consequently, the edition probably will not completely satisfy the needsof all of these divergent audiences, but it can certainly be appreciated in some way by any reader.


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All in all, Professor Andrew’s readings are insightful, thorough and solid. She makes a welcomecontribution to scholarship on Carmen Conde and exposes the poet’s moving response to theSpanish Civil War. The final result is a portrait of a poet with profound feelings, anauthoritative voice, and the masterful ability to communicate artfully the horrors of war.

CATHERINE G. BELLVER

University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

WENDY-LLYN ZAZA, Mujer, historia y sociedad: la dramaturgia espanola contempor-anea de autorıa femenina. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger. 2007. xvi�201 pp.

The critical literature on contemporary female Spanish playwrights has grown steadily sincethe mid 1980s, doing a great deal to give their texts the academic recognition they deserve.Book-length studies, however, are still scarce, which makes Zaza’s wide-ranging volume awelcome contribution to establishing the importance of women playwrights in thedevelopment of Spanish theatre in the last three decades of the twentieth century. As wellas combating the marginalization of dramaturgas, the book sets out to show variousinteresting ways in which their work challenges patriarchal discourses and illuminateswomen’s experiences of history and social change.

Zaza provides a wealth of useful information about dramatists and contexts, andoffers perceptive readings of plays which should stimulate readers’ desires to explorefurther. However, the insistent focus on what is proposed as the purpose of all the worksdiscussed* ‘una apelacion en contra de la injusta polıtica de exclusion efectuada por unareligion, literatura, historia y sociedad masculinas’ (162)*ends up obscuring the value of thetexts, limiting their range of meaning, and effacing crucial differences between the trajectoriesof individual playwrights. Irene Macıas’ 1999 article, ‘The Uneasy Politicisation of SpanishWomen Playwrights and their Theatre’ warns of the dangers of the unproblematizedconflation of ‘the vindication of the woman dramatist’ with ‘the celebration of a progressiveideology in her theatre’ (Forum for Modern Language Studies, 35:3 [1999], 286�96). Zazawould have done well to take more account of scepticism of this kind.

The book’s structure is thematic, identifying a series of historical stages in the subjectionof women and discussing plays selected for their challenge to these processes. Chapter Idiscusses plays by Carmen Conde, Marıa Zambrano, Carlota O’Neill and Carmen Resinowhich deconstruct foundational myths of patriarchy: original sin, Antigone, Circe andPenelope. The analysis of the texts in terms of their rewriting of myths is convincing, but isframed by excessively sweeping generalizations about the evolution of Western civilization.Chapter II examines history plays by Concha Romero, Ana Diosdado and Carmen Resinowhich focus on Isabel la Catolica, her daughter Juana, Elizabeth I of England and Enrique IV(re-evaluating his traditionally despised ‘feminine’ qualities). Strong arguments are madeabout the use of gender stereotyping to discredit historical figures, the dehumanizing effects ofpower and the reassessment of female ‘madness’. However, the complexity of some of the playsis not fully accounted for, and the discussion would have benefited from reference totreatments of these historical figures by male playwrights, as well as to Francoistmanipulations of the myth of Isabel. The historical context of Chapter III is the Republic,the Civil War and its aftermath, explored through plays by Teresa Gracia, O’Neill and PilarPombo, in which the author sees parallels between women’s resistance to patriarchy and theoppressed pueblo’s struggle against authoritarianism. This is complemented in Chapter IV bya lengthy discussion of Lidia Falcon’s Las mujeres caminaron con el fuego del siglo in relationto her feminist activism in other spheres. A clearer and more critical sense of the history offeminism in Spain would have made both of these chapters more effective.


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The last three chapters of the book examine contemporary Spain from three differentangles: a Lacanian analysis of female subjectivity and women’s struggle to escape frommasculine discourse (V); a political critique of the shortcomings of the transition to democracyand the incompleteness of the sexual emancipation accompanying it (VI); and themultiplication of perspectives associated with postmodernism (VII). The issues are relatedto a selection of plays by Marıa Manuela Reina, Julia Garcıa Verdugo, Paloma Pedrero, MarıaJose Rague Arias, Concha Romero, Carmen Resino, Petra Martınez, Lluısa Cunille, ItziarPascual and Encarna de las Heras. This approach has considerable advantages in terms ofconceptual coherence, and it produces valuable insights and comparisons. However, the choiceof texts for each chapter often seems arbitrary, and many of them would merit discussionunder more than one heading. There are also problems with the categories themselves:Chapter V pays too little attention to the body; VI defines the Transition as 1975�82, yet allbut one of the plays discussed were written after 1982; and the account of postmodernismgiven in VII is illustrated very diffusely by the texts selected.

A weakness throughout this volume is the lack of attention to the specific qualities ofdramatic texts and the circumstances in which they are performed. A focus on texts ratherthan productions as the object of study is justifiable, especially when one is arguing thatfemale dramatists have been unfairly denied access to the stage, but it is important to takeaccount of the theatrical potential of those texts. The book’s failure to do so adequatelyexacerbates the tendency to flatten differences between authors and between works, andcontributes to the sense that the whole approach is insufficiently critical.

MICHAEL THOMPSON

University of Durham.

SARAH WRIGHT, Tales of Seduction: The Figure of Don Juan in Spanish Culture.London: Tauris Academic Studies. 2007. xvii�285 pp.

The author of this recent contribution to Don Juan studies acknowledges at the outset that ‘[i]tis impossible to approach [Don Juan] afresh, as if seeing him or his cultural manifestations forthe first time’ (14). Notwithstanding this proviso, ‘the chapters of this volume explore [in avariety of ways] Don Juan in Spain from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present.Moving between Don Juan as myth (in the sense of idea rooted in the national psyche) andcultural manifestation, they focus on the shifting projections of meaning which centre on thefigure of Don Juan’ (22).

Chapter 1 focuses on Las hijas de don Juan, a short novel by Blanca de los Rıos,and on the theme of degeneration. Chapter 2 looks at Gregorio Maranon’s homophobicinstrumentalization of Don Juan as a warning against national impotence. For theendocrinologist ‘[t]he danger of Don Juan, as an emblem, is that he remains linked to hisbody, all absorbed by sex and love and he does not care to channel his sexual desire into other,more nationally useful activities’ (66). Chapter 3 reads Saenz de Heredia’s 1950 film, Don Juan,as a text which exploits suture and spectatorship to create a fascist aesthetic in which Don Juanis recruited to an ideology of Catholic supremacy and conquest. Chapter 4 provides an overviewof productions on the Spanish stage of Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio over the last two centuriesbefore focussing on a 1949 production which featured input from Salvador Dalı.

Chapter 5’s focus is Calixto Bieito’s production of Mozart’s opera, read alongside PierreBourdieu’s analysis of taste as a marker and mode of social class. The chapters are presentedwith an immediacy and generally clear style that makes the book an engaging read, althoughthe dynamic of Chapter 5*a play-off between Spanish and British critical receptions ofBieito’s avant-garde interpretation of Don Giovanni*may not work for those predisposed tobelieve that British criticism often reacts in a dismissive and indifferent establishmentarian


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manner to anything perceived as a threat: ‘Spanish critics took time to reflect on the meaningof the operatic production, with much more favourable result than the knee-jerk reactions ofthe UK critics’ (185). Wright’s interpretation of the production’s use of rubbish is an engagingone, and is focussed on trash as the effluent surplus of consumer capitalism. An interesting tiewhich could have been made to Chapter 2’s reading of Don Juan’s ‘indiscrimina[cy] in theproduction and dispersal of sexual fluids’ (55) concerns the anthropoclastic use of the DonJuan myth*uncovered if not greatly elaborated by this study*perennially to rubbish humanbeings whose sexuality is not biologically reproductive. The Salzburg Marionettentheaterwould make an interesting counterpoint to Wright’s consideration of Bieito’s use of dolls, as itsrepertoire includes Don Giovanni, complete with a male lead resembling a Legoland tin-potdictator (a wonderfully ironic, if unintended commentary on the role of political power,however diminutive, in seduction). The book ends with an interesting coda examiningSeductor, a photograph created by Naia del Castillo.

The book’s genesis in discrete articles is sometimes apparent, as in the repeatedobservation that mention of Don Juan is absent in Freud’s oeuvre. Juliet Mitchell’sforeword can be seen as trying to rectify Freud’s oversight by slotting Don Juan into aparadigm of human sexual and emotional development familiar from psychoanalysis, viz. ‘DonJuan’s narcissism invokes our own. It is horrible in the adult world of responsibility anddelightful in the bisexual childhood one of play’ (xv). Readers are authoritatively informedthat ‘[t]ransgressive sex and murder are two sides of the same coin’ (xvi). The additiverhetorical gesture which infantilizes bisexuality and equates homicide and transgressivesexuality is not characteristic of the main text’s systematization of iterations of Don Juan,although the volume’s survey does occasionally cast a glance towards a disciplinary view ofnon-normative human experience. This is most pronounced in the discussion of Don Juan as‘the perfect icon for the peculiar language of electronic eros’ (5), an intriguing look at seductionand Don Juanism on the web. With blogs like ‘Seduccion y superacion’ (maintained by internetDon Juan and self-proclaimed seduction maestro David Del Bass) gaining tens of thousands ofhits, and bestsellers like Mario Luna’s Sex Code reframing seduction and Don Juanism as abranch of the self-help genre*whilst simultaneously reclaiming Don Juan as a specificallySpanish myth*this discussion is a very timely one.

Although Sarah Wright does not study the growth of online seduction schools and the DonJuan self-help genre, the introduction, ‘In Search of Don Juan’, does read the electronicpersonals column through the Spanish myth which has become synonymous with seduction.The fibre optic agora Wright describes is one far removed from a darker world of Altrincham DonJuanes (Kill Me If You Can, I Love You Bro), but, nevertheless, it is juxtaposed with apremonitory formulation: ‘Don Juan is at home in new technology, a site for the projection offantasy and identification, which offers electronic promiscuity without responsibility’(5; emphasis added). At moments such as these, the foreword’s tone of homily seems lessremote. Cross-dressing is linked to guilty pleasure (190�91), non-normative sexuality with theghostly and the macabre, whilst the camp aesthetic is connected with an inauthentic perimeter(121) and it is sometimes hard to tell where the reader should position the boundaries of theseassociations*in the texts under consideration or within the analysis itself? As Wright remarksin her conclusion: ‘Don Juan seems to vacillate between the liberatory trickster and an agent ofconservatism’ (192) and this vacillation may account for the volume’s ambiguities. As Wrightgoes on to say: ‘Don Juan’s conservatism in this volume has as much to do with my selection ofmaterial as with the history of Spain’ (193). Generously, the text leaves open the possibility of,and points the way towards, further investigation: a different selection of material might yieldanother, less conservative, but no less Spanish picture.

RYAN PROUT

Cardiff University.


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ADRIANA J. BERGERO, Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires,1900�1930. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2008. 476 pp.

Buenos Aires at the start of the twentieth century was a heady space of cultural exchange andrapid transformation. An expanding working class comprised principally of Europeanimmigrants generated a city teeming with multiple languages and cultures. At a time whenintellectual elites were striving to formulate a single, unified Argentine nation, the verynature of Buenos Aires subverted that project. Adriana Bergero’s interdisciplinary study ofcultural geographies underscores this mutable Buenos Aires. During the first three decades ofthe twentieth century, she stresses, the city was ‘chaotic’ (1), ‘in a state of constant transition’(14), making it ‘fiendishly contradictory’ and ‘perplexing’ (433), not to mention ‘tricky’ (343).Unsurprisingly, the cultural texts dealing with this city speak of ‘chaos from kaleidoscopicpoints of view’ (2).

Certainly Buenos Aires at the turn of the last century was a protean city and suchmetamorphosis is very evident in cultural texts of the time, a point made by Beatriz Sarlo inher book La modernidad periferica: Buenos Aires, 1920 y 1930 (Buenos Aires: Nueva Vision,1988), discussion of or reference to which is surprisingly absent from Bergero’s book. Butidentities are always in flux and cities are always chaotic, perplexing places*as Bergeroherself notes: ‘The city [ . . .] is not static content, but pure movement’ (6). Thus, a description ofBuenos Aires*or any other city*as ‘nothing, if ‘‘to be’’ implies an essentialism fixed byidentities and routines’ (105) is rather redundant. By stressing the way Buenos Aires defiesany semblance of static identity or fixity, it is as if Bergero wants to suggest that the city liesbeyond definition, a position that goes rather in the face of the analysis that follows. BuenosAires changes constantly but that does not preclude Bergero talking about it either as a wholeor as a series of simultaneous and intertwined cities.

As Bergero acknowledges, within all this confusion and chaos, cities and their imaginariesalso hold within them ‘discursive nodes’ (7) and ‘rhetorical commonplaces’ (15). It is preciselyaround these points of discussion and commonality that the city takes shape. Thus, thestrongest passages of Intersecting Tango are those grounded around such nodes. Chapter 14,for example, which deals with the 1919 ‘Semana Tragica’, highlights how the media used theimage of women working at the city’s telephone exchange to construct an ideal of work, genderand nation that contrasted with the violence occurring on the streets. Equally helpful are thediscussions of the various urban peripheries, from the wastelands and grids of the arrabal, tothe up-and-coming suburbs. Chapter 20, in particular, with its analysis of the suburbanexpressions of love, gender and geography to be found in poetry, tango and popular theatreprovides an intriguing counterpoint to the discussion of the downtown theatricality of upper-class living spaces in Chapter 2.

Like the city it describes, then, the book itself is constructed around its own set of nodes,forming a textual likeness of its Buenos Aires, somewhat directionless, somewhat ‘chaotic’.Perhaps this lack of direction is the author’s intention; after all, as Bergero reminds us at bothbeginning and end, the book is centred on her: it is, she writes, ‘my personal cognitive map ofBuenos Aires of the beginning of the twentieth century’ (ix) and ‘my attempt to trace the silentmessages of its spaces’ (434).

As a personal cognitive map, however, the book is often bewildering. With someknowledge of Buenos Aires, its geography, its urban and cultural history, the book (and thecity) is just about manageable; for everyone else, there are very few markers to help guide theway. The confusion brought about by the perplexing structure, which is frequently illogical, isheightened by the absence of maps and the lack of numbers for the illustrations. Muchcontextual information that could easily have been integrated into the body of the text istucked away in the footnotes. Reading the main text, for example, readers unfamiliar withEsteban Echeverrıa’s El matadero would be left completely unaware that the story predates


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the period under discussion by some fifty years. In addition, the book includes very littlediscussion of any of the theoretical areas that frame the analysis that follows: urban theory,gender theory, theories of cultural geographies and everyday life are all passed over ratherquickly. Bergero’s broad canvas no doubt hindered such discussions, but some of the vastprimary textual analysis might have been beneficially sacrificed in favour of a strongertheoretical positioning.

To avoid disappointment and frustration, therefore, the best way of reading this book is towander through its pages like a flaneur, ill concerned about direction or purpose but ratherrevelling in the breadth of objects of study, the mix of urban and textual analysis, and thevarious perspectives on gender in this mutable city. As a set of vignettes that portray the cityas a heteroglossic Babylon, a sort of compendium for cultural imaginaries of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, the book will*for some, at least*succeed.

JAMES SCORER

Manchester Metropolitan University.

MARIELA A. GUTIERREZ, An Ethnological Interpretation of the Afro-Cuban World ofLydia Cabrera (1900�1991). Lewiston/Queeston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.2008. 249 pp.

Mariela Gutierrez’s book deals with the oft-neglected short stories collected and published byCuban ethnologist and writer Lydia Cabrera. This text appears approximately at the sametime as another one of Gutierrez’s works also makes its way to library shelves: an annotatedEnglish translation of more than forty of Cabrera’s short stories that was published under thetitle of Afro-Cuban Short Stories by Lydia Cabrera, 1900�1991.

Gutierrez, along with other scholars like Alberto Hernandez-Chiroldes, Lauren Yoder,Isabel Castellanos and Madeline Camara, have worked diligently to bring long overdueattention to Cabrera’s work. The sheer dearth of active research on one of Cuba’s most prolificethnological writer, researcher and story-teller reminds us that the corpus of Latin-Americanliterature is all too often defined by international market sales of works that can be easilyassimilated into the Western literary canon. When one considers, however, the prevalence ofSanterıa and its wealth of cultural imagery among Cubans, it is somewhat surprising thatCabrera’s work has not received more theoretical and aesthetic attention. This is even moresurprising when one considers that Fernando Ortiz’s theory of transculturation approximatedthe post-colonial theories of hybridity avant la lettre. The mere fact that research on Afro-Cuban literature and culture is reduced to a relatively small circle of scholars more thanjustifies projects on Lydia Cabrera’s contribution to Cuban and Latin-American culture.

Gutierrez focuses on the following collections written and published by Lydia Cabrera:¿Por que? Cuentos negros de Cuba; El monte; Ayapa, cuentos de Jicotea; and Cuentos paraadultos ninos y retrasados mentales. Gutierrez also uses Cabrera’s ethno-linguistic studiesthat were carried out on the influence of Yoruban language in Afro-Cuban religions totranslate verses from the Lucumı liturgies and to explicate the symbolism in the stories. Thesetranslations add considerable depth to the meaning of the works themselves. What becomesclear throughout Gutierrez’s book is that the stories presented by Cabrera often exemplify theprocesses of cultural transformation that Africans from different nations who were forciblybrought to the New World as slaves were not only subjected to but also participated in.Throughout the book, Gutierrez makes the point that Afro-Cubans, despite their position ascolonized subjects, both by the metropolis and by white criollos, created a culture of oraturethat emphasized the capriciousness of the forces of nature, the values of cunning andintelligence over brute strength, and reverence of the deities that influence one’s destiny. In


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this regard, culture is not only resistance or assimilation, but rather creative interaction thatdoes both and neither.

The book is divided into five sections: an introduction, three chapters and an epilogue.The bibliography is one of the most complete that can be found on Cabrera’s work. With thenotable exception of scholarship on the works of Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, Afro-Cubanstudies are still regarded as marginal in Latin-American studies. Ironically, one has to recallthat Guillen was considered by Nancy Morejon as the most Spanish of all the Cuban poets ofcolour. For this reason, much of the scholarship about Cabrera’s monumental contribution toCuban culture on the island and in the Cuban Diaspora appears in obscure publishers in pre-revolutionary Cuba and exile presses like the Diario de las Americas, El Nuevo Herald andEdiciones Universal.

The first chapter is entitled ‘African and Afro-Cuban Factors in the Structure of LydiaCabrera’s Black Short Stories’. The purpose of this chapter is to elucidate the Africanmentality in contrast to that of Caucasians that emerges in Cabrera’s stories. Part ofCabrera’s authorial position was not that of an author of fiction or folktales, but rather as adedicated ethnologist who faithfully transcribed the folktales directly from her nativeinformants. To support this contention Cabrera had herself photographed with one of herinformants in Barrio Pogolotti in the 1930s, one of the wonderful photographs that Gutierrezreproduces in the text. Although it is likely that Cabrera was able to interview African-bornblacks in the early years of the Cuban republic, it is also the case that Cabrera inflected thesestories with the cultural currents prevalent in Europe and Latin America in the early part ofthe twentieth century. In this regard, Gutierrez correctly notes that Lydia Cabrera does herown share of invention and identifies the surrealist influence that has left an indelible mark inLatin-American literary and cultural expression. This framing of Cabrera’s work in the earlyCuban republic places it in the same trajectory as that of Ramon Girao, Fernando Ortiz,Romulo Lachatanere and Alejo Carpentier. Cabrera’s work is itself on the hyphen, appearingin the space between nineteenth-century ethnography, Vanguard primitivism, and subalterncultural and political expression. In this regard, one could argue that it participates in thecurrents of Latin-American culture that would eventually culminate in rich expressions ofmagical realism and testimonio.

The second chapter, ‘The Characters: Gods, Animals, Supernatural Beings and Objects’,illustrates the complexity of the Afro-Cuban cosmology by enumerating the deities, theirattributes, and their multifarious appearances. Gutierrez enumerates by example that whatmakes the orishas, or Afro-Cuban saints, particularly complex is the fact that they are alwaysalready multiple in their physical, gendered and racial appearances. In one appataki, orSanterıa folktale, an orisha like Yemaya, usually known as the mother goddess who reins overall bodies of water, has multiple manifestations. As Gutierrez observes, ‘Yemaya is also namedin accordance with the attributes and characteristics of the places that her waters reach, or forother circumstances related to their flow: Yemaya Ibu odo: the deep indigo sea; Yemaya LokunNipa: the force of the sea; Yemaya Okoto: the sea with a bottom of red clay, on the sea shorewhere there are shells [ . . .]’ (197). Gutierrez also identifies one instance in which this deity,who is almost invariably female, is represented as male.

Cabrera’s folktales are often like the bestiaries of the Middle Ages and of the Africanfolkloric tradition. These compendiums of beasts describe animals, places and objects, andplace them in a narrative that infuses them with a moral lesson. In regard to an Afro-Cubancosmology, which is Gutierrez’s interest, this use of animals as a means to convey knowledgereflects a belief that the realm of the divine was also that of nature. Every living thing has itsplace and its own special meaning in the eyes of the orishas. For example, in one of the storiesthat Gutierrez describes, the toad plays an important role. Physically, the toad is a very uglycreature that has yet to experience joy. None the less, the toad plays his part in the greatscheme of things by protecting two children lost in the forest. The moral lesson that underliesthe story is twofold: one learns not to trust appearances and to seek the underlying reality and


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that selflessness is rewarded. Despite his ugliness, the outpouring of the children’s affectiontoward the toad permits him to experience joy for the first time ever.

One of the best aspects of the book is that it gives those who are unfamiliar with the Afro-Cuban pantheon an ample description of the deities and their attributes: Eleggua, Chango,Oya, Ochun, Oggun, Ochosi, Obatala, Ifa, the Ibeye and Babalu-Aye. The strength of the bookis in the meticulous recounting of Cabrera’s tales. All of which draw readers toward Cabrera’swork and serve as means of highlighting the rich field of Afro-Cuban myths and legends thateven appear in the works of Cuban-American novelist Cristina Garcia. There are two principalrecurring contentions that are repeated throughout the book: the first is that Afro-Cubanmythology has little to envy in the myths of Western culture. Literally, there are no missingelements. Afro-Cuban folktales, myths and legends have their own tales that parallel themyths, legends and fairy tales. The second contention is that, in Cabrera’s folktales, cunningand intelligence prevail over the arrogance of brute force. One of the other figures thatappears throughout Gutierrez’s book is Jicotea, the name given to a species of turtle native toCuba. Similar to Brer Rabbit and the Tortoise in North American folklore, Jicotea constantlydemonstrates that fate is capricious and that intelligence and luck trump physicalstrength.The third chapter, which is the best of the book, is entitled ‘The Theme of theWaters’. This chapter is particularly appropriate due to the importance of Yemaya and Ochun,the two aquatic deities in Santerıa, and the fluid nature of Cuban culture. As Antonio BenıtezRojo argued persuasively in his classic essay, La isla que se repite (Barcelona: EditorialCasiopea, 1998), Cuba has a maritime culture and the sea’s ebb and flow bring a multitude ofcultural influences from other spaces. That is, the lack of fixity, the primordial nothingness ofthe sea, in many ways marks the origin of life and Cuban culture. Gutierrez also makes ampleuse of the symbolic and mythic implications of water by citing from the works of Pierre Vergerand Juan-Eduardo Cirlot to demonstrate that waters can not only bring destruction but alsoare the source of regeneration. Once again, the elements that stand out in this chapter are thedetailed plot summaries and the linguistic commentary on the use of Lucumı in Cabrera’sstories.

In short, Mariela Gutierrez’s book is a necessary piece of scholarship that presents thework of an important and oft-neglected woman writer. At the same time, the book also showsus how much more research and study is still needed.

JAMES J. PANCRAZIO

Illinois State University.

RAPHAEL COMPRONE, Four Major Latin American Writers*Pablo Neruda, MarioVargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcıa Marquez. With a Foreword byHenry Sussman. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press. 2008. 283 pp.

The title of this book, which is somewhat misleading, raises the first of several questions aboutits professionalism and value to the specialist in Latin-American literature. To be fair,Comprone’s work is intended for the comparatist, but an aficionado of comparative literaturefifty years on from the start of the Boom might reasonably expect more than the derivativecoverage, and partial representation of an assortment of works by the four big names citedplus others including Isabel Allende and Julia de Burgos. Comprone does not lack ambition, ashis early invocations of Paz, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Fanon et al. indicate; but of thesepotential luminaries, only Barthes and Fanon are used to productive effect, for example in hisanalysis of narrative codes in ‘Alturas de Macchu Picchu’ or in his interpretation of Neruda,also in that poem, as a third-world post-colonial intellectual matching the blueprint sketchedout by Fanon in Les Damnes de la terre. The chapter on Neruda illustrates several pertinenttraits of Comprone’s study. The interpretation of ‘Alturas’ in terms of a poetic vision that seeks


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to ‘[revitalize] the slumbering imagination of the masses through vivid, emotional languagethat contradicts the bureaucratic and lifeless ideologies of modernity’ (48) rests on awell-established critical consensus and is backed up by several statements by the Chileanauthor himself. The role of binary opposition in the conceptual structure of ‘Alturas’ isundoubtedly essential to its poetic logic. Yet, paraphrase plays too large a part in Comprone’saccount, and his English prose-style is often forced and inelegant. Worse than that, not onlyare his translations of several phrases flawed, but he misreads the story told throughout‘Alturas’ as taking place in the present tense, instead of viewing it as articulated around theepiphany which, we are told, changed for ever the poet’s life and consciousness. Anotherregrettable feature is the large number of misprints in the verses quoted in Spanish: ‘lavertinosa carretara espira’; ‘los cuchillos que guardsteis’; and many others.

As stated in the Introduction, Comprone’s main business is to assert the centrality of theencounter with the Other in Latin-American literature. In reality, this means repeating the bynow familiar ideas about ‘opposition to the dominant literary expressions in North Americaand Europe’ (1), and the importance of ‘hybrid writing style’ (16), besides contesting theidentification of Latin-American culture with Western notions of Latin-American culturalinferiority. But the indiscriminate use of ‘Other’ as a capitalized adjective in statements suchas the following, is far from helpful or enlightening: ‘Neruda unveils an Other interpretationof Latin American history based on his poetic vision . . .’ (12); in Elogio de la madrastra,‘Vargas Llosa describes an Other sexuality, conmingling the perverse world of unconsciousfantasy with high culture’ (12); and, in Aura, ‘Carlos Fuentes reveals an Other reality . . .’(ibid.). When Comprone uses the same adjective without the capitalized ‘O’, there is noperceptible difference of meaning or, apparently, even in intention. Finally, although some(claims to) theoretical authority might be inferred from the citing of Big Names that include,in addition to Barthes, Lacan etc., those of Bernard McGuirk and Lois Parkinson Zamora,neither in the bibliography nor in the footnotes is any reference made to critics such as PeterBeardsell and Djelal Kadir. An even more surprising absentee is Robert Young, author ofPostcolonialism, An Historical Introduction.

ROBIN FIDDIAN

Wadham College, Oxford.

MIRIAM HADDU, Contemporary Mexican Cinema, 1989�1999: History, Space and Identity.With a Preface by Nuala Finnegan. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.2007. xii�253 pp.

Haddu’s book is predicated on the proposition that Mexican filmmaking has undergone asignificant renovation during the past twenty years. International successes of key films (e.g.,Amores perros [2000]), the transnationalization and globalization of actors (e.g., Gael GarcıaBernal, Selma Hayek) and directors (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro), and,perhaps most significantly, the turning away from the tried-and-true themes of Mexicancinema after the Revolution, both those that hewed to the folkloric and those that explored thedifficulties of urban life. It is not that films on these themes are no longer being made*afterall, Amores perros is the greatest Mexican urban film since Luis Bunuel’s Los olvidados(1950), a half century previously*but that they break many of the unwritten, rigorouslyobserved taboos of institutionalized filmmaking: the ban on any language other than Spanish(e.g., Guita Schyfter’s Novia que te vea [1994]: Ladino and Hebrew are both spoken in thefilm); the imperative only to treat queer issues in a tragic mode (Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’sDona Herlinda y sus hijos [1985]: the two queer couples live happily ever after); women canonly be unconventional and independent if they get their come-uppance, a la Marıa Felix, oras in the case of the Hermosillo’s famous Marıa de mi corazon (1979), virtually a cult film in


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Mexico (Alberto Isaac’s Mujeres insumisas [1995]: a group of women make, so to speak, a messof omelettes . . .); the injunction against speaking ill of Mexican institutions (Jorge Fons’ Rojoamanecer [1989]: the only film that deals directly with the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre identifiesunambiguously the role of military storm troops); the requirement that the PRI and thepolitical process it supports not be criticized (Luis Estrada’s La ley de Herodes [1999]: politicalcorruption plain-spokenly presented). It is not that anti-establishment films were notpreviously made (e.g., Luis Alcoriza’s Mecanica nacional [1972]: parodies of three sacredMexican institutions: the all-purpose grandmother Sara Garcıa; the all-purpose suavegentleman Manuel Fabregas; the all-purpose Mexican chanteuse Lucha Villa). What issignificant is the concentration of cinematographic projects that defy values and institutions:Mexican films no longer had to be, well, Mexican. Bunuel may have almost been run out of thecountry over the transgressions of Los olvidados, but fifty years later no one batted an eyelidover the bankruptcy of Mexican life and the sacred values that ground it, as portrayed byAmores perros. Who could deny that the film was, in the end, rigorously documentary and thatthe apocalyptic nature of its ending was not fully on target?

This paradigm shift in Mexican filmmaking is tied by Haddu to the significant politicaland social events in Mexico beginning in the 1990s, and there can be little question thatMexico has undergone major changes in recent decades. But it is also true that the filmindustry has had its own unique changes, such as the rise of more independent filmmaking,often with foreign capital, as the old studio system has weakened, especially with thesubtraction of official government support that ensured the high quality and the uniformity ofthe important arch of production that extends from the consolidation of the Revolution to the1980s.

Haddu’s study is essentially a thematic and descriptive one, with five chapters on sixtopics: political histories; re-writing the Conquest; redefining la madre mexicana; the returnto neighbourhood settings; the US-Mexican border; and city versus countryside. In general,Haddu’s film selections are appropriate. The choice is not a complicated one because of theparticular successes I have mentioned above, but there is also an inclusion of important filmsthat have not been exactly international successes. It is also important to underscore the wayin which feminist filmmaking is particularly featured, with two of the chapters specificallyfocusing on work by Marıa Novaro (the most important woman working in Mexican cinematoday) and Dana Rothberg. Thus, it would be inappropriate to make too much of the lack ofattention to other films: Novia que te vea only gets mentioned in passing, for example, when itsimportance as a Jewish film is of considerable significance: it is at that time that Mexico canbegin to accept that being Jewish is not being a deficient Mexican: Jews come out of the closet,as do other ethnic identities, and the imperative to only be Mexican in one overarchingnationalistic way begins to crumble. Could anyone have envisioned Carlos Reygadas’ Stelletlicht (2007), which is mostly spoken in the German dialect of its Mennonite main characters,having been made in Mexico twenty or even ten years ago?

This monograph, then, is useful for the films Haddu does survey and the way in which shestresses their relationship to important changes in Mexican cinema in the decade at issue, inconjunction with social and political changes. Her analyses, however, do not seem to begrounded in any particular theorizing about film, about Mexican culture, or about the ideologyof cultural production as it relates to film. This is particularly noticeable in the treatment offilms made by women: there is no fruitful engagement with feminist issues, either in general,as they relate to Mexican women, or as they impinge upon filmmaking. Queer issues,therefore, do not even get mentioned, and there is no reference to Hermosillo, who by anyaccount must be recognized as Mexico’s most transgressive pacesetter: his De noche vienes,Esmeralda (1997), based on Elena Poniatowska’s short story of the same name, is still thequeerest film ever made in Mexico and a marvellous deconstruction of the cliches of marriage.Moreover, Haddu has not paid all of her scholarly debts: there are some significant lacunae inher bibliographic citations: Carl J. Mora, Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexualities in


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Mexican Film (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2006); Julia Tunon, Mujeres de luz y sombra en elcine mexicano (Mexico D.F.: Colegio de Mexico/Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografıa, 1998);Carla Gonzalez Vargas, Las rutas del cine mexicano contemporaneo, 1990�2006 (Mexico D.F:CONACULTA/IMCINE, 2006); and David William Foster, Mexico City in ContemporaryMexican Cinema (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2002). All four of these studies intersect withtopics Haddu examines.

DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER

Arizona State University.


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Reviews of Books

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