History Of Spanish Literature Research Articles

Hispanofilia e hispanofobia en el imaginario estadounidense: la España del Cid, de la virilidad épica a la decadencia

"During a period of around 100 years, the American audience was exposed to the history of Mio Cid from several points of view. The world of The Alhambra:A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and Spaniards by Washington Irving provided in 1832 an idealized version of this period of Spanish history. This was followed by the more nuanced visions of the History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella by William Prescott in 1837 and George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature in 1849. A new vision of the Cidian imaginary was that of sculptor Anna Hyatt in several of her famous statues devoted to El Cid in the 1920s in Balboa Park, San Diego, or in the Hispanic Society of New York. Of course, she was influenced in her choice of topic by her husband Archie Huntington, the founder in 1904 of the Hispanic Society. The corollary to this representation of Cidian history came in 1961 with the epic film The Cid, greatly acclaimed by critics and audiences.Keywords: Mio Çid Ruy Díaz;Washington Irving; George Ticknor; Prescott; Anna Hyatt"

La reescritura en la obra de Joaquín Dicenta: el proceso genesíaco de Encarnación (1913)

Part of Joaquín Dicenta’s large literary production is currently overlooked in Spanish literary history, despite being one of the most unique figures of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century period. He is primarily remembered for his prolific journalistic work and for introducing social drama to Spain—a theatrical genre cultivated by European playwrights at the time. This paper aims to shed light on an aspect of Dicenta that has been relatively neglected by scholars: the genesis of his novel Encarnación (1913). In composing this book, the author appears to have merged stories from Spoliarium (1888) and certain passages from Idos y Muertos (1909), both inspired by biographical events. I focus on several aspects, including the textual transmission of Encarnación, the underlying process of rewriting, the biographical episodes that inspired the novel, and the similarities and differences with the other two works with which it has been linked.

Poetic Reality in Primer exilio by Ernestina de Champourcín, an Exiled Female Poet of the Generation of ‘27

This paper investigates the poetic reality in Primer exilio by Ernestina de Champourcín, an understudied and forgotten female poet of the Generation of ‘27, also known as the Silver Period in 20th Century Spanish Poetry. Most of the 1927 Generation poets were exiled to Europe or Latin America during the Spanish Civil War or in its aftermath, and they were only able to return to Spain after the death of General Franco. Upon their return, they had difficulty in adjusting to their homeland. The female poets shared the journey of their male counterparts in their social struggle and experienced the same tragedies. Although their intellectual and artistic identities were known, these female poets, among whom were important thinkers, artists, writers, and translators, did not receive the due attention they deserved as their works were not included in the poetry anthologies of the period and were disregarded by literary critics, which delayed their rightful recognition and acknowledgement in Spanish literary history. By considering the social and cultural climate of its era, this paper explores the poetic realism in Primer exilio by Ernestina de Champourcín, who was born in Vitoria in 1905. After a discussion of the historical, social, and cultural circumstances of the period in which the poet lived, which was a critical moment in Spanish history, her poetic inclinations and the influences on her poetica are evaluated and the poetic realism created in her work Primer exilio is exemplified by poems translated from Spanish into Turkish. As a topic that has only very recently received attention, this paper references articles by Spanish poetry scholars and critics as well as the poet’s own thoughts and poetry.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno ed. by Luis Álvarez-Castro

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno ed. by Luis Álvarez-Castro Francesc Morales Álvarez-Castro, Luis, ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno. Modern Language Association of America, 2020. 247 pp. ISBN: 9781603294423. Miguel de Unamuno is one of the most studied and debated Spanish authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is no surprise, then, that one of the last additions to the Modern Language Association of America publications is a book about the Basque-born writer. The following essay reviews the goals, target, and possibilities of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno, edited by Luis Álvarez-Castro. The context in which the volume has been published will also be an element of concern for this academic review. As part of the MLA series, this volume provides instructors with resources to teach certain literary texts. Nonetheless, Spanish letters do not have a strong predicament among the series. If readers look at the one hundred and seventy-one volumes in the collection Approaches to Teaching World Literature, they will see how very few explore Spanish literature. Less than seven per cent are related to authors or works from Spanish letters. Therefore, the book edited by Álvarez-Castro in 2020 is not just a qualitative addition to the ranks of MLA scholarly production, but also a necessary quantitative one. The goal and target of the volume has a clear double intention in mind. On the one hand, "while Unamuno's critical relevance in Spanish studies is secure and indisputable, the author's standing is less prominent in other academic fields and in Spanish literature syllabi at the undergraduate level" (ix). Also, he is greatly underrepresented in the broader context of comparative studies, such as general education courses on world literature, as well as in courses taught by departments of philosophy, religion, French, and English (ix). Indeed, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno is helpful not just for instructors of Spanish literature classes, but also for English and philosophy courses as well. The interdisciplinary nature of the text is the main contribution of the book to the humanities at large because the philosophical aspect of the writer is often neglected. This section needed a better location in the organization of the essays, instead of an odd position next to the last. To effectively organize the 247-page volume, Álvarez-Castro divided the book into two distinctive parts. The first section gives information on different editions and translations of Unamuno's works focusing primarily on scholarly and critical sources. The second section is a group of essays that introduce students to the range of his works in Spanish language and literature, comparative literature, religion, and philosophy classrooms. More so, it includes audiovisual resources still in preparation at [End Page 205] the time of completing the book, such as Alejandro Amenábar's film Mientras dure la guerra, "a historical film based on the last six months of the writer's life" (16). In other words, part one, together with the works cited section at the end of the edited volume, is likely the most complete bibliographical recollection about Unamuno to date. On the other hand, the scope of part two is so vast that it required a subdivision about the writer's biography and his texts as a teaching tool. Indeed, the short essays cover a variety of approaches, including the biographical details. The exile the author suffered in the 1920s is present in several of the essays, such as in the ones by Stephen Summerhill (71) and by Ana Urrutia-Jordana (87–92). Also, the admiration he had for other Iberian cultures, such as the Portuguese and the Catalan, is certainly addressed in the introduction written by Álvarez-Castro himself (19) and in Juan Francisco Maura's text: Unamuno learned that "there is no history of Spain without Portugal and that the history of Spanish literature would be incomplete if it did not embrace Portuguese literature as one of its central components" (77). As Maura asserts in his essay, the Basque writer has a lot to offer given current nationalist polemics in Spain (77). Here we have...

The Visage of a Dream: Culture, Commodity and Affect in Rosalia de Castro’s El caballero de las botas azules (1867)

Critics of the work of Rosalía de Castro (1837-1855) have noted the difficulties her novel El caballero de las botas azules (1867) poses for both Spanish and Galician literary historiography. A metafictional satire written in Spanish and set in Madrid, it is difficult to place within narratives of Galician literary history that imagine Rosalía as a saintly founding mother, as well as within narratives of Spanish literary history that imagine a teleological development of the novel from Romantic to Realist forms. This article will situate El caballero as a hinge text, a farewell to a Romantic poetics of melodrama and named emotions and a move towards a modern literature of affect, a transition that is inflected by a profound meditation on the role of literature within a world of increasing consumerism and commodification. The discussion will be framed in terms of the twin themes of hysteria and dandyism.

On the Historical Background and Creative Characteristics of the Birth of Spanish "Generation 98" Literature

After Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American war in 1898, its national power plummeted. The glory of the past no longer exists, and this huge contrast is an unacceptable shame for intellectuals. With the purpose and ambition of saving the country, a group of young scholars gathered together to jointly create a precedent in the history of Spanish literary creation, which is known as the "generation of 98". Spanish "generation 98" literature occupies an important position in the history of Spanish literature and world literature. Through the study of the characteristics of this generation's literary creation, we can better understand the various social forms of Spain at that time and the new changes of Spanish literary creation under the influence of the latest European thoughts at that time.

This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets by Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza

Reviewed by: This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets by Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza Lori Mele Hawke Aguirre-Oteiza, Daniel. This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets. U of Toronto P, 2020. Pp. 392. ISBN 978-1-487-50381-9. In his latest book, This Ghostly Poetry: History and Memory of Exiled Spanish Republican Poets, Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza presents an engaging analysis of not only exile and poems written in exile, but also the relationships that exist between exilic writing, literary history, and national culture. Characterizing exilic poems as "acts of textual resistance" to conventional understandings of Spanish literary history, which affect a recuperative attitude toward the cultural productions of exiles, Aguirre-Oteiza proposes reading practices that expose the ways in which exilic poems "resist and disrupt" historical narratives about national culture (3). He identifies a tension between reading practices that focus on "intentional, representational, referential elements" and those that attend to the "border-crossing, non-chronological, plurivocal, and plurilingual patterns" present in exilic poetry. His exploration of that tension through textual analysis supports the author's argument that the conventional formation of the Spanish literary canon is a "reductive framework for elucidating the discursive complexity of exilic poems" (8–9), and demonstrates the advantages of This Ghostly Poetry's approach. In chapter 1, "Introduction: On Forewords and Historical Ghosts," Aguirre-Oteiza presents his argument while situating the book within and explaining its contributions to the field of Spanish literary criticism, establishing the study's theoretical framework, defining the reading strategies the book will employ, and summarizing the chapters that follow. Though he undoubtedly accomplishes these ambitious intentions, the writing is overly complicated at times. This chapter is dense with readings and applications of theoretical and critical works, and lays the foundation for the reading practices that will be demonstrated in the following chapters. Aguirre-Oteiza's investigation of the concept of ghostliness in the poetry of Spanish Republican exiles builds on existing themes of ghosts and the ghostly in exilic writing and its critical studies. These are explored in "Part One: Exiles in Literary History," which encompasses the second and third chapters. In chapter 2, "Re-engaging with Ghosts in the Poetic Machine," the author turns his attention to the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, and the prominence of [End Page 721] poetry during this time. He chooses four poems that are especially representative of that period to examine in chapter 3, "Writing the War, Re-writing the Nation, Embodying the Voice of the People," and continues to leverage hermeneutics and post-structuralist theories to delineate his concept of poetic memory and his characterization of exilic poetry. "Part Two: Exiles in Poetic Memory" houses chapters 4–7 and is a series of case studies that "explore exilic texts as modes of disruption" with regard to national cultural history (11). Aguirre-Oteiza explains that his selection of poets (Juan Ramón Jiménez, Luis Cernuda, Max Aub, and Tomás Segovia) was strategic and twofold: First, their status as canonical writers "makes their exilic poetry amenable to being productively read … as … disruptive" with regard to conventional understandings of literary history (8). Second, these writers all wrote about each other, so there exists a fascinating interconnectedness (a "revealing constellation") among them, and examining each's writing in relation to the others' allows for a unique lens through which to consider their work within the context of Spanish literary history (11). It should be noted that Aguirre-Oteiza states directly that This Ghostly Poetry is a restricted and focused study rather than a survey or anthology of Spanish Republican exilic poetry (17). Though readers may regret that the selection of poets in his case studies was not more diverse—he did not include any women poets, for example—he does provide reasoned justification for his decision to focus on Jiménez, Cernuda, Aub, and Segovia, and on the specific examples of their writing that he has selected. The thoughtful organization of part 2 is one of This Ghostly Poetry's notable brilliances: Aguirre-Oteiza presents the four poets in order of increasing complexity with respect to the dimensions of exile that figure in their...

Silencing Borges

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most important writers in the history of Spanish literature. Borges’s stories, poems, and essays have been translated into English by a handful of translators. However, only Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked side-by-side with Borges for years in Buenos Aires to craft translations Borges personally contributed to and approved. This makes the di Giovanni translations stand out from all others. These translations, which were jointly copyrighted in both men’s names under the Copyright Act of 1909, are considered by many, including Borges himself, to be the author’s truest voice in English. Nevertheless, because Borges split the royalties generated by these translations fifty-fifty with di Giovanni, the financial arrangement drew the ire of Borges’s estate and publisher. After Borges died, his estate and publisher commissioned new translations of all his works, forced the di Giovanni translations out of print, and quashed every effort by di Giovanni to republish or reprint his translations of Borges. Today, the di Giovanni translations are disappearing. Because they are out of print, they have become difficult to find and, in some cases, exorbitantly expensive. This suppression of Borges’s voice in English is offensive from an artistic and ethical standpoint. This article argues it was also illegal. Under the Copyright Act of 1909, this article concludes that the suppression of the di Giovanni translations violated the translator’s rights as a joint author.

Петербург — Париж — Геттинген — Мадрид: сюжет из истории Истории испанской литературы

Петербург — Париж — Геттинген — Мадрид: сюжет из истории Истории испанской литературы

Історико-літературні синтези Пантелеймона Куліша

The article examines the theoretical and methodological foundations of historical and literary synthesis of Panteleimon Kulish in the context of European historiographical traditions, outlines the stages of development of literary history in Ukrainian literary criticism, and highlights the key features of European literary historiography of the 19-th century. The little-known studies of P. Kulish are analyzed and systematized, as well as their influence on the formation of Ukrainian literary historiography is generalized in the context of the evolution of European historiographic views. The narrative strategies of the literary critic are considered, which, based on the principles of positivism, determinism and culturological analysis of literary phenomena, mainly reflect the tendencies of the cultural-historical school. The evolution of the historiography of Ukrainian literature has been studied, as the concept "Note about Ukrainian Literature" (1848) by I. Vahylevych, "Three Introductory Lectures about Ukrainian Literature" (1849) by I. Holovatskyy and "Review of Works Written in Ukrainian " (1843) by M. Kostomarov had a decisive influence on the historiographical achievements of P. Kulish. The article also analyzes the key features of the historical and literary synthesis, selection of material, the main determinants of periodization and grouping of literary texts, levels of structural interpretation of writing in "History of Spanish Literature" (1849) by American historian J. Tiknor, which in 1851 was t ranslated by P. Kulish in " D omestic Notes". It is proved that the literary historiography of the Ukrainian literary critic in general is a synthesis of numerous historiographical modes, methodological historical and literary principles, the result of the consensus of different aesthetic and philosophical trends of the XIX century.

El exilio interior: vida y literatura de Carmen Laforet

The Inner Exile. Life and Literature of Carmen LaforetCarmen Laforet lives in the history of Spanish literature as the author of an extraordinary novel recognised with the Nadal Award Nada, 1944 who subsequently lapsed into a mysterious silence. Despite having published several works, including some noteworthy novels La isla de los demonios, 1952; La mujer nueva, 1955, La insolación, 1963, Laforet gradually abandoned the literary scene and her own writing, secluding herself into her inner world, a kind of self-exile driven by the need for privacy and independence, as well as her maladjustment and lack of rooting. The article seeks to delve into the imperatives and inhibitions which instigated that silence, identifiable both in her literary work and in the confessions to her relatives and letters she exchanged, among others, with the exiled Ramón J. Sender, with whom she maintained correspondence and a friendly relationship for many years Puedo contar contigo. Correspondencia, 2003.

Disoriented Postcolonialities: With Edward Said in (the Labyrinth of) Al-Andalus

This essay explores the relation between postcolonial theory and modern Arabic literature from a Spanish perspective. Both postcolonial studies and Arabic and Islamic studies present in Spain rather exceptional histories. Somehow dissociated from its original formulation, postcolonial studies were received in Spain more as a way of dealing with new “English” literatures than as a critical tool. On the other hand, the singularity of Spanish history ended up establishing Al-Andalus as a “domestic Orient”. However, the Spanish case is also unique because of Spanish colonialism in the North of Morocco and the Western Sahara. This other “Orient”, this time colonized, did not match Edward Said’s formulation for imperialism as “a dominant metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory”. Both North Africa and Al-Andalus were too embedded, historically and geographically, within “Spain”. This unique position of Spain, as a place that was orientalizing (and colonizing) at the same time it was orientalized is a complex and ambivalent situation that created (and still creates) many disorientations. On top of that, postcolonial Hispanophone literatures have been absent both from the postcolonial debates that have privileged texts written in English and French, and from the history of Spanish literature.

Literatura y medicina en los estudios del profesor Sánchez-Granjel sobre la generación del 98

Luis Sanchez Granjel is one of the key personalities in the modern Spanish Medical Historiography, not only for his teaching in the University of Salamanca –where he supervised tens of projects and doctoral thesis- but for his investigative labour showed in books, monographs, articles and talks. In this article we focus on his research into the History of Spanish Literature, concretely on the Generation of ´98 mainly through figures such as: Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Felipe Trigo, Pio Baroja and Azorin.

The Limits of ‘Spanishness’ in Nineteenth-century Spanish Literary History

AbstractThis article analyses some of the most representative histories of Spanish literature written during the nineteenth century (both in and outside Spain), to show the different definitions they offer of the limits of Spain and Spanishness: the chronological, linguistic and geographical limits set to the Spanish nation and literature, but also the inner limits of Spanishness; the conceptual, aesthetical or ideological limits that divide Spanish literature from not-so-Spanish literature, even within the external limits previously defined. I will also study, however briefly, how these configurations of the limits of Spanishness affect the selection and assessment of literary works.ResumenEl presente artículo analiza algunos de las producciones más representativas de la historiografía literaria española del siglo XIX, producida tanto en España como en el extranjero, para mostrar la definición de lo español que subyace en ellas, en especial en relación con los límites atribuidos a la nación y a la literatura española: no solo los límites externos, cronológicos, geográficos o lingüísticos, sino tambien los limites internos: la conceptualización estética o ideológica de lo español mediante la cual es posible distinguir la literatura nacional de la no nacional. También se estudiará, si bien de manera sucinta, el modo en que estas definiciones de los límites de lo español afectan a la selección y configuración del canon literario.

La «operación retorno» de la narrativa en el exilio en la prensa diaria del Franquismo (1966-1975). Los casos de "ABC", "Informaciones" y "Pueblo"

One of the most complex points of 20th century Spanish literary history is the reception of the narrative works written by exiled authors after the Civil War. This essay is an approach to the process of sudden recovery of their works after more than twenty years of banishment which took place in the last decade of Francoism and coincided with the so-called boom of Spanish American literature. In the introductory pages, the most remarkable features of this socio-literary phenomenon are analysed considering its various dimensions: the importance of censorship, the publishing context, the interests of cultural policies and the reaction of the actors of Peninsular cultural field. The core of the article is focused on how the literary supplements of three of national newspapers ―ABC, Informaciones and Pueblo― looked at the so-called «operación retorno» of exiled narrators. Book reviews, interviews and articles have been compiled in order to show the partial and conditioned reintegration of some exile authors in the literary canon.

Luis Felipe Vivanco: contemplación y entrega (review)

ALARCON sierra, rafael. Luis Felipe Vivanco: contemplacion y entrega. Madrid: iMadrid!, 2007. 197 pp.Luis Felipe Vivanco (1907-1975) was a prominent poet and intellectual of the Franco era, with roots in the avant-garde ferment of the Second Republic. He was a friend of Miguel Hernandez and of Pablo Neruda, and the nephew of Jose Bergamin, but he joined the Falange during the war because of his family background, his devout Catholicism, and his close friendship with Luis Rosales. Later, he would come to the trenchant conclusion that [t]odo lo que tiene calidad en Espana antifranquista (80), expressing a sense of deep shame for his participation in the movimiento nacional during the Civil War and the early days of the postwar period. In this respect, he is typical of disillusioned right-wing intellectuals of the period, like his friend Dionisio Ridruejo.As Rafael Alarcon Sierra points out in this well-written and informative biographical sketch, Vivanco es un poeta apenas leido (9). This, then, is an attempt to remedy a certain critical neglect and bring his work to the attention of readers who might have a distorted or simplified view of him as simply another rightwardleaning poet of the Generation of 1936 - a categorization that Alarcon Sierra astutely rejects. The book is particularly good in tracing the complexity of Vivanco's trajectory, from his literary youth in the Republic to his participation in the neoromantic and neoclassical trends of the immediate postwar period. Vivanco often wrote in the mode of intimate existentialism that was in vogue among poets of his circle. His interest in German poetry, especially Rilke, was also fairly typical of this epoch. Vivanco's Heideggerian approach to modern Spanish poetry, which to some extent foreshadows the later poetics of Jose Angel Valente and Chantal Maillard, is evident in his Introduccion a la poesia espanola, a critical work that Alarcon discusses at length. Vivanco was a fervent reader of Juan Larrea, Cesar Vallejo, and Luis Cernuda. His broad intellectual interests also led him to make a contribution to the study of Leandro Fernandez de Moratin.In 1958, Vivanco republished some avant-garde poems from the years 1927-1931, mixing in some imitations of his own earlier style, in a book entitled Memoria de la plata. This volume has led to some confusion, since some readers have naturally assumed that the entire book was written during the earlier dates. Relying on Vivanco's diaries, Alarcon Sierra corrects this chronological mistake, pointing out that the book was the recuperation del otro poeta que pudo ser (104) rather than a historically accurate representation of the poet that he really was. This return to the avant-garde is continued in Vivanco's final work, the posthumous Prosas propicias. Vivanco died on November 21, 1975, one day after Franco's own death, and this refreshingly outspoken work, whose title echoes the Prosas profanas of Dario, was published in 1976.One view of Vivanco would be to see him as a representative intellectual of the Franco period, whose life and work illuminate a significant period of Spanish literary history. Alarcon Sierra situates Vivanco in relation to other figures of the day, referring frequently to names like Ricardo Gullon, Dionisio Ridruejo, Jose Luis Cano, Damaso Alonso, and Gerardo Diego. This book would be useful, then, for scholars interested in contexutalizing the work of these other writers. …

Multilingual Translation and Multiple Knowledge(s) in Alfonso X’s Libro de la Ochava Esfera (1276)

The composition of the astronomical-and-astrological treatise known as the Libro de la ochava esfera involved several translators and compilers. They produced oral and written versions of aṣ-Ṣufī’s Book of the Figures of the Fixed Stars (itself based on a translation of Ptolemy’s star-catalog), and they consulted previous Arabic and Latin versions of these works. This article follows the traces that the collaborative-translation process left in the treatise’s many multilingual phrases, which combine alternative names for the constellations in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, and Greek. It argues that this translation practice worked as a conceptual model for the type of knowledge(s) ( saberes ) the treatise offered. The analysis and argument are inscribed in a discussion of the paradoxical place that the Libro de la ochava esfera occupies in the history of Spanish literature, and they offer a formal ground for challenging dominant conceptualizations of textual production and interpretation, which are based on a monolingual model.

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A NARCISSISTIC LOVER: JOAN ROÍS DE CORELLA’S TRAGEDIA DE CALDESA

The definition of “tragedy” in the cultural context of the early Renaissance is of paramount significance in the history of Spanish literature. One of the most intriguing cases in point pertains to the Tragèdia de Caldesa, a compact composition by Joan Roís de Corella (ca. 1433-1497), a noted humanist and theologian from Valencia. Here I propose a fresh reading of Corella’s masterpiece by focussing on the inner world of the lover - i.e., the author’s persona - who, from a narcissistic perspective, confronts the conflictive interplay of the male and female roles. Recent scholarship reveals as a correlative of the narcissism in question a text of solitude and alienation, the leading exponents of which may be found throughout the fifteenth century in the great masters of love-centered literature in both Castilian and Catalan. Among these oustanding authors, Ausiàs March, the nonpareil Valencian poet, transforms the indices of solitude and alienation into his own poetics of subjectivity. In the wake of March’s innovatory legacy, a group of gifted authors, who flourished in Barcelona or Valencia in the second half of the fifteenth century, evolved a distinctive literary mode endowed with theatrical potential. Arguably, it is this kind of theatricality that comes into play in the landmark creation of Corella’s all-important Tragèdia.

Lusismos o arcaísmos castellanos sobre la lengua de los dramas castellanos de Gil Vicente

Gil Vicente (1465-1536), Portuguese poet, composer and playwright is a significant figure of both Portuguese and Spanish literary history, as, in accordance with the traditions of his era, he wrote in both languages. What is more, Gil Vicente often used different languages in the same play. Many researchers, linguists, philologists and literary theorists call our attention to the fact that the language of the plays written by the author in Spanish is permeated with his Portuguese mother tongue. However, the definitive separation of phonetic, grammatical and lexical elements which can be interpreted as the result of this interference, and the determination of the ratio of these elements is made difficult by the fact that a significant part of these coincides with archaic or dialectal Spanish forms. In the paper, the author examines the vocabulary of the plays written by Gil Vicente in Spanish, and arrives at the conclusion that—in case the author actually made a conscious use of the languages known by him as a sign of refinement—it is possible that the elements which are hard to classify have to be considered forms used with conscious intention to reach an archaic or dialectic effect instead of simple Portuguese forms.

Voices from the fuente viva: The Effect of Orality in Twentieth-Century Spanish American Narrative (review)

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 the Other has of course a long history, beginning in colonial times and continuing through post-Independence to the present day. Millay’s study explores how the twentieth-century Spanish American ‘‘anthropologistwriters ’’ Lydia Cabrera, José Marı́a Arguedas, Miguel Barnet, Elisabeth Burgos and Augusto Roa Bastos inscribe orality as Other in their literary and ethnographic texts. Each of these writers, Millay suggests, invents an ethnopoetics in order to evoke the presence of the Other’s voice and create the effect of orality in their works. In order to create this effect, the writers take on the role of mediators, in Rama’s transcultural sense, establishing their authority to speak as the Other by invoking their uniquely intimate knowledge of both worlds. This rhetorical strategy, according to Millay, requires them to maintain the binary opposition between oral and literate cultures, an opposition that is ideologically constructed so that the writer becomes a necessary conduit for the disempowered voice to be heard, salvaged, and ultimately, contained. In the first chapter, Millay outlines how critics have treated the oral/literate divide since Ángel Rama wrote of the ciudad letrada in opposition to the oral culture of Latin America’s unlettered masses, and transcultural writers as mediators between these polarized worlds. Post-Rama critics she invokes who have thoughtfully examined Latin American writers’ inscription of orality in their texts include Antonio Cornejo Polar, Martin Lienhard, William Rowe, Carlos J. Alonso, Josefina Ludmer, Anı́bal González, Jorge Marcone, and Carlos Pacheco. Disappointingly missing from this distinguished list is Neil Larsen’s brilliant early reading in Modernism and Hegemony of Juan Rulfo’s use of oral language, a reading that would particularly enrich and support her notion that the textualization of oral language conceals an ideological agenda that involves subjugating the oral while creating the illusion of letting it speak for itself. Millay’s theoretical Reviews 231 discussion and readings are particularly indebted to Pacheco’s ideas about the ‘‘fictionalization of oral discourse,’’ which involves appropriating the discursive strategies of oral language to create textually ‘‘an aesthetic effect of orality.’’ In critiquing writers in her study, Millay argues for ‘‘a fluid approach that does not consider orality and literacy in purely oppositional terms’’ (18). Here she cites Marcone’s ‘‘theory of orality as a category that functions within writing’’ rather than outside it. Orality as an object of desire in this sense is an invention of literate culture that the writer deploys in order, paradoxically, to subvert the authority of writing. In Chapter Two, Millay discusses Lydia Cabrera who, like Carpentier, was inspired to explore Afro-Cuban culture during her years in Paris in the 1920s and 30s when ethnographers and surrealists became fascinated by non-European cultures . Cabrera’s ethnopoetics developed as a means to create the effect of the oral presence of the Afro-Cuban informants in her collections of folklore. Millay emphasizes the key role that poetry, seemingly closer to an oral aesthetics than prose, played in Cabrera’s artistic development. Of...