Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (review)

Abstract

Reviews 229 Overall, Realism as Resistance offers many worthwhile insights into these literary texts and is, on the whole, cogently argued and elegantly written. AKIKO TSUCHIYA, Washington University, St. Louis epps, brad, and luis fernández cifuentes, eds. Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005. 388 pages. In their excellent introduction to Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, Brad Epps and Luis Fernández Cifuentes warn readers that this collection of essays ‘‘is not a literary history, but at most a series of critical reflections on and about literary history’’ (42) whose objective it is to represent ‘‘a diversity of positions’’ (20) regarding a problematic which for some time now has been central to many Hispanists working within the North American academy : the reconfiguration of our research and curricular agendas beyond the parameters of what ‘‘Spanish’’ and ‘‘literature’’ have come to mean within what Joan Ramón Resina aptly calls ‘‘Cold War Hispanism.’’ That is to say, a Hispanism which ‘‘sidestepped historical materialism, feminism, class, race, and minority issues, all of them congruous with the critique of Spain’s imperialist past’’ (72). While it could be argued that the new generations of Hispanists have already problematized many of the tenets of literary history that they inherited—as evinced by the wealth of feminist and gender work which has been produced in the past twenty years, for example, or the postcolonial gaze that has been cast upon early modern literary production—the majority of the authors in this impressive and thought-provoking volume believe that much more rumination must be undertaken. These scholars suggest that Hispanism continues to be bounded by untenable linguistic, cultural and literary paradigms. In his lucid contribution Mario Santana articulates the critical reflection that runs through the majority of the essays when he states that Peninsular studies must ‘‘redefine its object of study’’ (120). One gets the sense when reading this volume that Hispanism is at an important crossroads and that it needs to be not only problematized but also theorized in new ways. Thus, the tone of the volume is urgent and, moreover, imperative. The book is organized into five parts, each of which reflects upon what are for the editors the crucial or perhaps the most vexed problematics within Peninsular studies: the language of literary history, the nineteenth century as the consolidation of a ‘‘national literature,’’ the pluralities of Peninsularism, contemporary theoretical approaches to Hispanism, and national identity. Each author contributes a very significant piece and, moreover, a distinctive approach to thinking about and through the complex landscape of Spain and its cultural production. Also, since each essay addresses a specific aspect of the manner in which literary history has conceptualized, for example a period, the nation—Spain as a monolingual entity—or the notion literature itself, the essays tend to unravel traditional literary history in order to reveal the discursive foundations upon which it has been constructed. Thus, the essays weave together a very welcome historical 230 Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.2 (2007) understanding and analysis of how contemporary Hispanism has come to be, with incisive and exciting proposals on how to shift the terrain of study and register the discursive formation of Spanish identity in our work and in our classrooms. Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity is an important book. Not only does it brilliantly question the discursive pillars that anchor the foundational fictions of Spanish literary history, it also provides lucid and alternative ways of redefining our object of study. In the wake of the imperative spirit of this volume, I would recommend that it be required reading for Peninsularists on both sides of the Atlantic. ALDA BLANCO, University of Wisconsin nauss millay, amy. Voices from the fuente viva: The Effect of Orality in TwentiethCentury Spanish American Narrative. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005. 222 pages. The complicity of writing in the historical trauma of conquest and domination has made it a guilty activity that yearns for the purity and innocence of language before writing, the language of those who have been silenced by that traumatic history. The fascination of Latin American writers with the ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘barbaric ’’ voice of...