Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain

Abstract

Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain. By Elizabeth B. Davis. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2000. 244 pages. La epics colonial. By Juan Bautista de Avalle-Arce. Anejos de Rilce 35. Pamplona: U de Navarra, 2000. 116 pages. Both studies propose a canon of epic poems encourage readers revisit a corpus that, with the exception of La Araucana, failed attract significant attention in late twentieth-century literary studies. Yet throughout the Early Modern period, the epic form retained its cultural capital; in fact, Frank Pierce's catalogue lists some 150 different Spanish poems (not counting reprints and translations) published in the seventeenth century alone (Davis 3). As her point of departure, Elizabeth Davis historicizes and theorizes the process of canon formation that marginalized Spanish-language epics, and then urges scholars and students examine anew the narrative poetry that imperial agents used to forge a sense of unity and script cultural identities during the period of expansion and conquest (10). She then provides five chapters, each of which reads a poem using historical analysis and literary theory. Specialists will want read the whole study, as Davis builds important theoretical and thematic bridges that link the different sections; at the same time, each chapter could stand alone as a case study for a graduate seminar because of the clarity with which Davis explains her methodology. The first chapter argues against David Quint's influential classification of La Araucana as an epic of the defeated, tracing Ercilla's project as it evolved from part I (1569) part III (1589); over two decades, Davis finds an increasingly panegyrical view of the Habsburg state. In this regard, she analyzes how the poet marshals a discourse of service script a relationship Philip II, drawing attention a little-known prefatory letter found in the princeps, but not reprinted in editions after 1579. Also in support of her thesis, Davis contemplates the poet's strategy of self-- positioning when he narrates the execution of Caupolican. As well, she draws connections sixteenth-century political theory argue that the poem represents the Mapuches as barbarians whom the Spanish monarchy has a providential justification subdue. One demurral with this chapter is the use of the adjective modernist classify the poet's position (59); theoretically correct, it seems so firmly associated with the past century that early-modernist might be preferable, if less wieldy. Nevertheless, the analysis of Ercilla as a contradictory subject provides a convincing demonstration of La Araucana's participation in Habsburg myth-making. The second chapter reads Juan Rufo's La Austriada through the filter of Renaissance theories on imitation. In a tour de force of explication, Davis sifts through the stock lexical items and newer, Ercillan set pieces that Rufo borrows narrate the battle of Lepanto. I would recommend this section anyone learning interpret Early Modern poetry, because it brings alive the process of writing through the imitation and emulation of authorities. The chapter also discusses how the poem interrupts its own celebration of Lepanto with a narration of the tragic aftermath of the Alpujarras rebellion. Chapter iii most explicitly confronts the problems that critics today face when reading Early Modern Spanish epics. Analyzing Cristobal de Virues's El Montserrate, Davis uses a feminist, resistant reader as a heuristic device with which interpret the foundational narrative built on rape and murder. While she validates resistance the work's reconciliation of rape and murder within a national teleology, Davis also draws attention the rhetorical and narrative elements of the hagiographies that would have framed an Early Modern reader's reception of this story. The fourth chapter contemplates Diego de Hojeda's La Christiada. Davis begins with a discussion of the theological underpinnings of the Dominican friar's epic of the Passion, discussing medieval debates about representations of the suffering messiah as they played out, first in Dominican circles in Europe, and then in Hojeda's American milieu. …