VALIS, NOEL. The Culture of Cursileria: Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 405 pages.At first glance, the culture of cursileria appears extraordinarily artless. Its forced and often exaggerated contrivances convey immodest pretense; somewhat wondrously, cultural expressions of lo seem to lack simplicity as well as complexity. In other words, as a form of human behavior or as an embodiment of an aesthetic ideal, the culture of cursileria would seem largely unimportant and easily dismissed as the unmitigated divulgence of bad taste. However, as Noel Valis explains, there is more to lo than the coarseness of bad taste, and she sets out to reveal its many meanings in a learned and imaginative study that both delights and instructs.Valis's exploration of cursileria is fruitfully interdisciplinary. She seamlessly integrates traditions of social and psychological behavior, visual imagery, and multifaceted narratives into patterns of meaning that emerge in Spain from the early iSoos to the end of the twentieth century. Valis constructs her study with attention to detail, covering the linguistic and historical terrain of cursileria while pointing to its persistence in Spanish middle-class culture, which often strains against the slow progression of modernity. Yet the term cursi itself resists efforts to assign origin or to pin down its meaning with overarching precision. Valis suggests a possible early source for the term during the 18305 in Cadiz (linked to the Sicur sisters and their Frenchified affectations), as well as a connection to the tradition of English cursive writing during the same period. On the whole, however, Valis's project is to construct a usable conceptualization of the term rather than a fixed definition. Indeed, Io remains always an amorphous, even slippery concept as Valis builds around it a cluster of identifiable traits: e.g., it grows from the transition to a modern, consumer-oriented society; it is most often associated with hand-made objects and personal behaviors of inadequacy marking class distinctions; it is overrun with commonness; it manifests bad taste.Following a chapter devoted to origins, in which she traces the uses and meanings of Io in relation to the uneven growth of the middle class in Spain, Valis moves to the heart of her study and the strength of her work as a critic: the analysis of texts using an array of critical tools. In chapter two, she explores the discursive side of Io linked to handwriting in certain commercial practices, and shows how circulation and exchange function metaphorically in middle class culture, as objects (e.g., fans, albums, parasols) come to form metonymie pictures of the self. Chapter two moves broadly in time and space in its exploration of Io and yields unanticipated insights into authors ranging from Larra to Clarin.Valis remains primarily in the nineteenth century in the next three chapters, beginning with a focus on the social practices of Romanticism as structures of feeling in upper middle-class society. Lo emerges in salons and other middleclass spaces through the self-conscious display of people unself-conscious enough to practice ostentation and who are willing to use poets such as Becquer and Antonio Grilo to define themselves and their obsolescent cultural behavior. …