Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Sol Miguel-Prendes

Abstract

 Reviews period. Particularly striking is his reading of male disabled bodies as metaphors for national trauma in a range of contemporary documentaries. Pitassio thus adds important nuance to discussions of Italy’s failure to account for its Fascist past, and the central role within that of damaged masculinity as a trope. Finally, both authors devote a chapter to the key question of the non-professional actor, so central to neorealism. It is startling that so little attention has heretofore been devoted to the most human part of this ‘cinema of humanism’. Taken together, both chapters emphasize the frequent moralizing of the film press and concern about possible deprofessionalization that the non-professional might bring to the industry. ey also both point to the new sources of acting stardom that were excavated in the period, such as beauty contests, competitions, scouting on the street, and the world of sport. Pitassio draws upon his earlier work on promotional paratexts of neorealist film to show how posters and trailers engaged the ‘obvious materiality of nonprofessionals ’ (p. ). He also traces in detail the lineage of the non-professional through the influence of Soviet theory on inter-war Italian film culture. However, both scholars emphasize the way in which, despite the development of a new star system in Italy by the early s, and the gradual erasure of the non-professional actor, the widespread presence of the non-professional in cinema of the late s formed the basis for a new paradigm of ‘authentic’ stardom, which le its strongest commercial legacy in the fame of untrained female stars such as Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and Silvana Mangano. As I mentioned at the outset of this review, neorealism is frequently seen as a field that has been worked to exhaustion. Yet clearly when understood as a network of intersecting institutional, cultural, and artistic practices it is a terrain yet to be fully mined. While neither Pitassio nor Gundle claims to have resolved complex questions such as the slippage between ‘neorealism’ and a broader cultural field strongly marked by certain practices associated with films and directors who later came to be categorized as ‘neorealist’, they illustrate some of the directions for future scholarship to build upon. To switch metaphors, the ‘neorealist galaxy’ identi fied by Pitassio (p. ) suggestively encourages us to understand the period as one in which films, people, practices, technologies, and institutions are in constant but uncertain relation, and within which many future objects of study might yet be discovered. B U C O’R Narrating Desire: Moral Consolation and Sentimental Fiction in Fieenth-Century Spain. By S M-P. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. . x+ pp. $. ISBN ––––. e existence and definition of a late medieval genre of ‘sentimental fiction’ in Iberia have been repeatedly contested. ere have been numerous discussions regarding which texts comprise the genre, while its purportedly unifying characteristics—e.g. MLR, .,   courtly love, pseudo-autobiography, metafiction, intertextuality, tragic endings— have failed to provide a definitive link between the texts in question. What scholars tend to agree on, however, is that there is something special about these works and that a common focus on internal psychology and subjectivity anticipates the modern novel. Against the backdrop of an unsatisfactory definition, Narrating Desire constitutes one of the most rigorously contextualized defences of the generic unity of sentimental fiction. For Sol Miguel-Prendes, its roots can be found in late medieval education and the rise of vernacular humanism, and it is the transformation of the scholastic canon that enables authors to innovate. Miguel-Prendes restricts the moniker of sentimental fiction to texts that distort or ‘contrafact’ the moral consolation, a literary mode inspired by Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In doing so they naturally contain a plurality of discourses and thus multiple voices emerge, prefiguring the novel. Miguel-Prendes admirably explores a vast corpus of texts, considering canonical Castilian fictions such as Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor alongside less familiar Catalan works. In the Introduction, she redefines sentimental fiction by focusing on what it takes from penitential consolations and reworks, namely the Boethian dream vision. Penitential consolations and sentimental fictions can...