El Amor Research Articles

The Female Body and the Environment: A Transnational Study of Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, Murakami Haruki’s Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera

The female body is often depicted in parallel with the environment in many literary works. This article examines how the female body can prompt a rethinking of the environment by analyzing three literary works, Mo Yan’s Feng ru Fei tun, published in 1996 Murakami Haruki’s Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru, published in 1994-1995, and Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera, published in 1985, which root in Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American cultures, respectively. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the female body parallels the environment by displaying non-human characteristics and relating to natural elements in these three works; on the other hand, it deconstructs the boundary between the environment and humans by playing a crucial role in constructing human identity. This paper draws on theories of posthumanism, material feminism, and ecofeminism to explore the depiction of the female body and its role in rethinking the environment. The cultural hybridity of local and non-local worldviews—a key reason for situating this study within a transnational comparative framework—serves as a crucial element in demonstrating how the female body bridges the environment and human identity across all three works. This analysis aims to deconstruct the anthropocentric perspective on the environment, thereby rethinking the role of the female body in this context.

Muzyka a dyplomacja kulturowa, czyli kilka słów o budowaniu marki „hiszpańskości” i muzyce Manuela de Falli (na przykładzie baletu El Amor brujo)

MUSIC AND CULTURAL DIPLOMACY, OR A FEW WORDS ABOUT BUILDING THE BRAND OF SPANISHNESS’ AND THE MUSIC OF MANUEL DE FALLA (ON THE EXAMPLE OF HIS BALLET EL AMOR BRUJO) Manuel de Falla’s (1876–1946) oeuvre was already discussed in terms of national Spanish music and specific Spanish values during the composer’s lifetime. Following de Falla’s death, some of his compositions, most notably the ballet El Amor brujo (1915), which refers to the culture of Gitanos and the phenomenon of flamenco, began to function as emblematically Spanish works, i.e. representative of contemporary Spanish music. As a result of the cultural diplomacy implemented by the Francoist government, flamenco was endorsed internationally as a hallmark of Spanishness. Works referring to flamenco, such as de Falla’s El Amor brujo, were thus also intensively promoted: numerous film productions referring to flamenco alluding to de Falla’s ballet in the plot and in the musical layer, significantly contributed to the international success of this work.

The Dynamics of Triangulation in Cervantes’s El amante liberal

This essay analyzes Miguel de Cervantes’s El amante liberal as a type of psychomachia that dramatizes the battle between two systems of interpersonal triangulation that change and mold the conduct and character of the protagonist Ricardo, and to a degree, of the other protagonist Leonisa. René Girard’s mimetic desire, which degrades and dehumanizes individuals, and St. Thomas Aquinas’s Christian friendship, which foments love and generosity, are inscribed in the story to explore the theme of identity and offer a Cervantine paradigm of reading and interpretation. This paradigm allows for ambiguity, hybridity, and changing interpretations.

Perfil revisado: Vicente Aleixandre, Antonio Machado y otros lectores de Carolina Coronado en la Edad de Plata

Important authors of the Spanish Silver Age such as Vicente Aleixandre or Antonio Machado show, at some point in their work, the reading and influence of the romantic writer Carolina Coronado (1820–1911). This article analyses the reception of Coronado's work in Vicente Aleixandre's La Destrucción o el Amor (1935) (specifically, in the poem "La luna es una ausencia", which the author dedicated to her) as well as in Antonio Machado's poem “A José María Palacio”, present in the second edition of his book Campos de Castilla (1917). It also traces the peculiar presence of the author in the work of other twentieth century writers such as Ramón Sijé or Gerardo Diego; but it mainly focuses on the authorial image that they all construct of Coronado, as well as the aspects and motifs that most interested them in her writing.

(Sin)vergüenza: El amor del revés de Luisgé Martín a la luz de la teoría de los afectos

Abstract: This article offers a new reading of Luisgé Martín's autobiography El amor del revés (2016) through the lens of affect theory, building on the writings of the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on shame and periperformative utterances. A methodological framework proposed by the Polish queer theorist Tomasz Basiuk is used here to compare the configurations of shame in Martín's autobiography with the rhetorical strategies in American gay men's life writings. Performances of shame are foregrounded in the analysis as a salient feature of El amor del revés , in order to argue that they serve as a means to overcome the homophobia internalized by the generations of men who grew up in Spain under Franco's dictatorship. Borrowing Basiuk's key deconstructionist concept, exposure, which conveys the risk taken by gay authors in their autobiographical texts, I posit that Martín writes socially engaged literature, and that in doing so he relies on the coming-out narrative model typical for gay autobiographies to tell the story of his life. Yet he uses rhetorical strategies that reveal the constructedness of the story and of his sexual identity.

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

“If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!”: Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties in the United States

No hay burlas con el amor and the Finicky Educated Lady from Calderón to Molière

The aim of this article is to undertake a reflection on the caricatural character of Quevedo’s culta latiniparla and her inclusion in No hay burlas con el amor, urban comedy by Calderón de la Barca. The article will adopt a transnational and intertextual approach linked to the reception outside Iberian borders of educated woman who boast a pompous language. In particular, following a series of critical controversies on the possibility that Molière could have been inspired by this play for his work Les femmes savantes, a contrastive analysis will be carried out to assess the real entity of the Calderonian reverberations in Molière’s text, showing both points of contact and discrepancies related to reworking the wise and hembrilatina lady cliché.

“Erasing a mural does not erase reality”: Queer visibility, urban policing, and the double life of a mural in Ecuador

Halted by the police, repeatedly defaced, and ultimately erased, the mural El Amor No Tiene Género (Love Has No Gender) lasted less than one week on the streets of Quito before it disappeared under a layer of whitewash in July 2019. The image – a trio of kissing couples – was painted by local street artist Apitatán to celebrate Ecuador’s landmark approval of marriage equality. Its destruction inspired widespread media coverage, direct-action activism, and institutional support for the mural which culminated in its revival two months later. This article investigates what the double life of Apitatán’s mural reveals about the politics of visibility in Quito at a critical moment of consolidating political rights for the country’s LGBTQ community. Drawing on digital ethnography and storytelling methods, I weave together these two visibility disputes – about the mural and about queer love – to illustrate how public visibility is always contingent. To do so, my analysis explores the interplay between erasure and policing practices to enforce conditions of visibility within the urban environment.

Escaping aesthetic control

Spanish pianists, educators, and commentators have relished passing down to following generations the performance practices of their own tradition, with the renowned institution L’escola de música de Barcelona claiming to offer specialist training in “Spanish music”. In this context, Granados’s Goyescas have inevitably become the almost-exclusive domain of native musicians, herding artists’ creativities towards sets of performance instructions familiar to them. That we should continue to consider this repertoire as a specifically separate entity, fully knowable only by local artists or those trained within their tradition, is worthy of attention, as it places anyone outside this educational background and performing tradition as ‘other’ in need of acceptance. While the study of Granados’s output has recently been enriched by analytical investigations, recording projects, and new critical editions, it is the still unfamiliar early-recorded legacy by the composer/pianist that will be the catalyst for insights in this article. His Welte-Mignon roll recordings show a dynamic and flexible artistry, unsurprising in pianists of his generation, together with a lack of highly articulated ornamental inflexions and the rhythmical rigour we might expect in performances of such repertoire. The question that I wish to raise is whether at some point during the twentieth century there was a cultural shift that shaped ‘Spanish music’ to sound as distinctively national as possible. Such a shift would have occurred, in the minds of players, in parallel to wider changes in performance styles taking place throughout the continent. Exploring these aesthetic ideals through the lens of the country’s cultural history during the troubled years across the middle of the last century may hint at the subtle but meaningful ways that defined a canon flavoured with local folklore, both within and without the Spanish borders. The aim throughout is to challenge these orthodox approaches controlling the repertoire, resulting in my own renewed performance of El amor y la muerte; the hope will be that of empowering pianists to make different choices, diversifying performance options in the future.

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

To Africanize Spain: Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry and the Persistent Forms of al-Andalus

Fu Manchu, Hollywood Cinema, and Orientalism in the Work of Juan Marsé

Juan Marsé is one of Spanish literature’s most cinematic writers. Marsé himself has talked extensively in interviews about his passion for Hollywood cinema and the important role it played during his childhood in Barcelona. Critics such as Samuel Amell, Kwang-Hee Kim, and Jorge Marí have studied the influence of cinema on Marsé’s writing, both aesthetically and in terms of subject-matter. One aspect of Marsé’s relationship to twentieth-century cinema culture that has been overlooked by scholars, however, is his engagement with the medium’s Orientalism. Hollywood cinema has a long and sustained history of employing orientalist tropes and capitalizing on the widespread yellow peril discourse. An analysis of three of Marsé’s most critically-acclaimed novels, Si te dicen que caí (1973), El amante bilingue (1990), and El embrujo de Shanghai (1993), demonstrates how Marsé has recycled transnational tropes associated with the yellow peril, such as the figure of Fu Manchu, in ways that address concerns particular to the twentieth-century Spanish and Catalan contexts. Using Homay King’s theorization of orientalist mise-en-scène, this article argues that Marsé employs tropes borrowed from Hollywood cinema to highlight questions of identity, truth, and survival, themes that constitute an important through line in his writing.

Entre la convención y la creatividad. Unidades fraseológicas con la palabra corazón en la traducción polaca de la novela “El amor en los tiempos del cólera”

El presente estudio investiga la traducción de las expresiones fijas que contienen la palabra corazón en la versión polaca de la novela El amor en los tiempos del cólera. Esta versión de la novela nunca ha sido objeto de estudios de traducción. El estilo de García Márquez es original y artístico, pero al mismo tiempo abunda en expresiones idiomáticas, que se suman a su calidad natural y auténtica. A menudo el autor modifica intencionalmente esas expresiones. Las expresiones idiomáticas, tanto las regulares como las modificadas, constituyen un desafío para un traductor. El estudio adopta el enfoque de la Lingüística cognitiva, que ha demostrado ser adecuada y eficaz en los trabajos de traductología de Elżbieta Tabakowska (2001, 2008), Krzysztof Hejwowski (2004, 2017) y Tomasz P. Krzeszowski (2016). El análisis ha revelado algunas dificultades en la traducción de estas expresiones, debido a la falta de equivalencia en diferentes niveles: en el nivel de contenido conceptual, constructivo, grado de convencionalidad y cohesión léxica. Se analizan y discuten las estrategias utilizadas por el traductor para resolver esos problemas.

(De)Pathologizing Lesbian Desire in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain

Discussions of "tribadas," "viragines," "marimachos," "hermafroditas," "mujeres hombrunas," and "lesbias" appear in works by prominent nineteenth-century sexologists. Vicente Suárez Casañ's El amor lesbio (1892), seemingly the lengthiest account on the topic of the time, insists on tying masculine lesbians, or marimachos, as he refers to them, to hermaphroditism. He also underscores the distinction between masculine and feminine lesbians, while revealing the persistent belief in spontaneous sex change and connections between lesbians and witches. While Eduardo López Bago's La Pálida (1884) and La monja (1886) reproduce long-standing beliefs that tie lesbianism to prostitution, hysteria, convents, and sorcery, the radical naturalist conspicuously shies away from the figure of the butch lesbian or "female hermaphrodite." In contrast, Emilia Pardo Bazán features a masculine lesbian associated with witchcraft as the eponymous protagonist of her short story "Afra" (1894). And in 1901 she publishes the column, "Sobre ascuas," about the first gay marriage in Spain between two women in A Coruña. Although most of these medical, literary, and journalistic discourses appear, in some way, to endorse heteronormativity and patriarchy by pathologizing female same-sex desire, they all simultaneously deconstruct arguments about the naturalness of universal heterosexuality.

Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture by Anne Fuchs

MLR, .,   character who speaks. Chapter  examines the difficulties of conveying the shis in tone and situation that this rich polymetric verse marks in the original. Jeffs examines the opening stanzas of the four plays that were staged in the Swan to exemplify the kinds of decisions that were taken to preserve some sense of the original verse structure. Chapter  augments the analysis of these decisions with respect to characterization, while Chapter  analyses the deployment of metatheatrical moments, particularly with respect to the play-within-the-play sequences, ceremonies, and role-play. ese two chapters offer a wealth of individual case studies of how the texts were explored in rehearsal and how they worked in performance. e final chapter considers the impact that the RSC’s Golden Age season has had on subsequent productions in the US, Spain, and, more centrally, the UK until . Apart from briefly considering two American stagings of e Dog in the Manger, it traces Boswell’s subsequent comedia productions, first in Madrid with Rakatá (El perro del hortelano in – and Fuente Ovejuna in , both performed in Spanish) and then in Bath. As Artistic Director of the Ustinov Studio in the latter city, he produced e Phoenix of Madrid (a reworking of No hay burlas con el amor) by Calderón in , and then a three-play season in : A Lady of Little Sense (La dama boba) by Lope de Vega, Don Gil of the Green Breeches (Don Gil de las calzas verdes) by Tirso de Molina, and Punishment without Revenge (El castigo sin venganza) by Lope de Vega. Jeffs’s book is a stimulating and hugely detailed account of the making of the landmark RSC’s Spanish Golden Age season. It analyses the challenges of working on the interface between two very different dramatic traditions and languages, displaying rigorous linguistic, cultural, and scholarly awareness of the processes of translation and adaptation. is book proposes a model to foster more widespread production of these plays, a kind of collaborative toolbox to revive Spanish comedias for modern English-speaking audiences in the twenty-first century. We can only hope that theatre practitioners and producers may draw inspiration from Jeffs’s painstaking work to revive more of the hidden treasures of Spain’s rich dramatic heritage. U  L J A. P D Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture. By A F. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. . xx+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Precarious Times takes as its starting point fundamental shis in the temporal conditions of the twenty-first century brought about by the interconnected forces of digitization, globalization, and accelerated capitalism. As Anne Fuchs observes, much recent criticism on these matters is imbued with ‘temporal anxieties’ (p. ) and pervaded by a crisis narrative that paints present-day experiences of time as stagnant, flat, disembedded, or atomized. Wary of such ‘monolithic and deterministic ’ (p. ) perspectives, Fuchs turns to the realm of culture to draw a more  Reviews multifaceted picture of our contemporary timescapes. Engaging with a remarkable collection of authors and genres, ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and focusing on German-language literature and culture in particular, Fuchs interrogates the alarmism underpinning much of the recent temporal diagnostics. She convincingly illustrates that temporal anxieties and complexities ‘are part and parcel of the complicated story of modernity’ (p. ) and hence not solely a problem of the here and now. Moreover, she emphasizes that artistic practice has since modernity provided opportunities for questioning dominant time regimes, allowing for the exploration of alternative temporal trajectories and the recuperation of Eigenzeit (pp. –). Fuchs is careful, though, not simply to celebrate art as a panacea for modern culture’s continuing struggles with time. While contemporary art in particular is deeply committed to the possibility of alternative experiences of time, oen accompanied by more attentive relationships with the world and others, these attempts oen remain fleeting and precarious. e book’s first chapter introduces key theoretical engagements with time in the era of digitization, including seminal accounts by Hartmut Rosa, Byung-Chul Han, John Tomlinson, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, David Harvey, and Robert Hassan. Fuchs identifies...

El monstruo humano. El yo homosexual en El amor del revés (2016), de Luisgé Martín

The aim of this research is to study Luisgé Martin’s El amor del revés. This autobiography will be approached not only as a literary text, but also as a testimony of what it meant to be a homosexual man in the early Spanish democracy and in the following years. Therefore, the analysis will be centered on the interaction between concepts like homosexuality and difference. It will be focused on those identity elements that shape the autobiographer’s self, and the voice that recognizes itself as homosexual and writes itself from that position. In order to achieve that objective, a sociological approximation based on the ideas of scholars such as Brubaker, Cooper, Guasch, Eribon and Mira will be applied.

Doubling Down on Stupid: Direction, Misdirection, and Miscommunication in El castigo del penséque

Doubling Down on Stupid:Direction, Misdirection, and Miscommunication in El castigo del penséque Robert L. Turner III (bio) Although Tirso de Molina (1579–1648), pseudonym for the Mercedarian priest Gabriel Téllez, is best known as the author of El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville) and El condenado por desconfiado (Damned by Despair), his corpus includes dozens of plays spanning multiple subgenres.1 Tirso is one of three key playwrights who dominated Spanish theater in the early modern period. Together with Lope de Vega Carpio (1562–1635), the creator of the comedia nueva ("new theater"), and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), the master of baroque language and palace theater, Tirso de Molina helped to elevate an immensely popular public entertainment to a deeply philosophical commentary on society, identity, power relationships, and justice. For early modern Spain, the corral ("theater") was an extremely popular destination with a higher per capita attendance than that at North American movie theaters in the early twenty-first century.2 The comedia, as the dominant theatrical form of the period came to be known, took form in the late sixteenth century as Lope de Vega created a winning formula based on domestic and Italian sources. As he explains in his El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo [End Page 33] (The New Art of Writing Plays in Our Time), his vision includes a break with the classic tradition in favor of a more popular set of themes, all set within a three-act structure that runs for roughly three thousand lines of verse. The comedia is characterized by the use of multiple verse forms and a plot that almost always ends in either marriage or murder. Parallel or doubled plots, with the nobles' efforts frequently being echoed by a coarser or more satirical version involving the servants, is a common element as well. The genre is also full—especially in the urban and cloak-and-sword subgenres—of derring-do, battles, duels, disguises, secret marriages, betrayals, mistaken identities, and similar attention-grabbing plot devices. At the same time, the comedia includes a focus on character development and a psychological depth that was lacking in earlier Spanish theater. Born Gabriel Josepe López Téllez to humble parents in the San Sebastian parish of Madrid (Vázquez, "Gabriel Téllez" 22), Tirso joined the Mercedarians as a young man and served within the order until his death. This religious involvement formed a core part of his literary identity and may also explain his use of a pseudonym since some religious leaders strongly opposed the ribald nature of these secular plays (Vázquez, "Tirso de Molina" 358). While both Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca were also ordained to the priesthood, each entered into formal religious orders in their fifties, and writing was always their paramount focus. In contrast, Tirso took on several important roles within his order, including writing its history as the order's chronicler. At the time of his death he was the comendador ("interim abbot") for the Mercedarian monastery in Soria. Tirso's plays are often structured around the overarching concept of justice, where divine and social justice excuse actions that violate contemporary mores.3 His criticism of societal corruption, including that of King Philip IV's favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, is likely the reason that the Junta de Reformación ordered him, in 1625, to cease his writing and leave Madrid, calling his works "scandalous."4 Tirso's work consistently tilts toward psychological conflicts and shows an obsession with the use of disguise, a love of mistaken identities, a tendency to write sympathetic and norm-breaking female characters, and a fascination with multiplications of the self—all of which further his exploration of issues surrounding power and justice. These themes are [End Page 34] frequently expressed through various forms of doubling. This doubling includes the creation of doppelgangers (as is the case in this play); the creation of multiple identities, such as in La celosa de sí misma (Jealous of Herself), where the protagonist has to win against an idealized version of herself; layered identities, as in El amor m...

MAKNA KASIH DALAM KOMPOSISI “UNA LIMOSNA POR EL AMOR DE DIOS” KARYA AGUSIN BARRIOS MANGORE

Abstract
 This research aims to describe the meaning of love in the composition "Una Limosnita Por El Amor de Dios" by Agustin Barrios Mangore. The method used in this research is a qualitative method with a qualitative descriptive approach. Based on the results of the analysis and interpretation of the data, an indication that the meaning of love from the composition "Una Limosnita Por El Amor de Dios" is reflected in the title and musical elements in the composition. The title of the song, which means "Charity for the Love of God" has the meaning of living in loving one another (Philia's love) to reflect God's love (Agape love). The elements that support the delivery of meaning in the composition of the song Una Limosnita Por El Amor de Dios are the use of minor scales and modulation to major notes, stepping melody intervals, tremolo ornaments throughout the song, intros which are accompaniment motifs along the song, there are along Picardy at the end of the repetition of the theme, the use of the plot is diminished before the major line at the end of the song, the dynamics that are played are based on the feelings of the player.

Clara Campoamor en Buenos Aires (1938-1955): Un feminismo transnacional

ABSTRACT This work is based on three compilations of articles written by Clara Campoamor in Buenos Aires during her exile between 1938 and 1955: La mujer en la diplomacia y otros artículos, El amor y otras pasiones, Artículos literarios and La mujer quiere alas y otros ensayos, published between 2017 and 2019. The memory of Spain and the fight against fascism are prominent. But it is mainly feminist issues that she addresses, inspired by the example of Americans to re-consider the role of women in society. The perspective is transnational. The author’s analysis of the role of education and the importance of love for women are very topical.

Memoria y reflexión en el cine de Jaime de Armiñán

After the success of Mi querida senorita (1971), the scriptwriter and director Jaime de Arminan decided to direct his next works within a line of recovery of historical memory. As did his contemporaries Victor Erice (El espiritu de la colmena, 1973) and Carlos Saura (La prima Angelica, 1973), in El amor del capitan Brando (1974) and iJo, papa! (1975) Arminan decided that the time had come to reflect on the Spanish Civil War and its consequences. He did it from a friendly and complacent posture, according to the years of change that were beginning to awaken in the country, and where the death of General Franco marked the end of a long dictatorship and the beginning of a new democratic stage.

Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares: Reading Their Lessons from His Time to Ours by William H. Clamurro

Reviewed by: Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares: Reading Their Lessons from His Time to Ours by William H. Clamurro Stephen Hessel (bio) William H. Clamurro. Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares: Reading Their Lessons from His Time to Ours. Lanham, KY: Lexington Books, 2015. 131 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7391-9347-1. The Novelas ejemplares is normally tackled by Cervantes scholars in two ways: as individual novellas or as a complete literary endeavor. In some less frequent cases, academic studies pair novelas together, placing them in conversation with one another, in order to address a common issue. All these strategies have provided readers with a wealth of information and insight, but the—at times—dizzying complexity of Cervantes's collection of stories seems to invite us to explore what further permutations the text may offer us. William Clamurro's latest book-length project attempts to—and succeeds in—doing just that with an approach that groups works together thematically in order to address a myriad of topics. This thematic approach allows him to simultaneously engage multiple perspectives, thereby celebrating the rich complexity of Cervantes's work, while also allowing the confusing and frequently contradictory aspects of these works to remain as such. Rarely have I encountered a work of literary criticism that so effectively and convincingly makes a point without foreclosing other perhaps contradictory interpretive avenues. This achievement allows Clamurro to ultimately return to the purpose of the project, which he alludes to in the title. Through the many varied lessons that he helps the reader better understand, he creates the necessary conditions in which one of Cervantes's greatest lessons can be clearly addressed: a profound lesson about the act and consequences of reading. These lessons are divided into six themes corresponding with the book's six chapters, but both the introduction and conclusion are far more than mere summary—both offer valuable insights into the work as a whole and "El licenciado Vidriera" respectively. In the introduction, Clamurro presents his methodology through the lens of his extensive experience as a teacher of the Novelas ejemplares. His desire to make this work accessible to 21st century readers in obvious, but he also endeavors to do justice to the text and its sociohistorical context. The question of how to engage our contemporary sensibilities without "anachronistically imposing our own twenty-first century critical concerns" (3) is offered as the primary goal of the monograph and remains an omnipresent and guiding question for the reader as they venture through the following chapters. Clamurro clearly hopes that this approach will facilitate a resurgence of [End Page 197] interest in the Novelas among contemporary readers, whose cultural context is well positioned to be illuminated by the lessons Cervantes offers. Chapter one, titled "Social Class and the Paradoxes of Privilege," brings three of the novellas into conversation with one another: "La gitanilla," "La española inglesa," and "El celoso extremeño." Material wealth is the central focus in its ability to determine a character's membership in a certain social stratum and the privileges, or lack thereof, that accompany it. This "symbolic function of wealth," as Clamurro calls it, provides readers with another point of access through which they can consider the way money and privilege provide another important factor in understanding identity within Cervantes's sociohistorical context (7). Clamurro's skill as an incisive reader allows him to nuance and highlight certain aspects of each novela's plot in order to construct a reading that is disconcerting and jarring, but also to produce revelations for readers, even those who have spent quite a bit of time with these works. By bringing the transactional nature of many interactions between characters to the fore, he reveals not only isolated curiosities but also deeply ingrained currents that most readers may have overlooked. Chapter two, "Women and the Limits of Agency," is a carefully crafted examination of Cervantine women through an analysis of female agency in an impressive number of the Novelas: "La gitanilla," "El amante liberal," "La fuerza de sangre," "Las dos doncellas," "La ilustre fregona," "La española inglesa," "El celoso extremeño," and "La señora Cornelia." Instead of simply placing female characters in the two...