Literature, 1898–1936 K

LITERATURE, 1898–1936 K. M. Sibbald, McGill University This survey covers the years 2010 and 2011 1. General, Literary and Cultural History After some intense critical activity in recent years, there is a certain lull in production. Rather than hurrying into print yet another memoir for immediate consumption, there is evidence of deeper reflection driven by inventive eclecticism rather than circumstantial interest, and this welcome multifariousness is examined in what follows. Joan Brown, Confronting Our Canons. Spanish and Latin American Studies in the 21st Century, Lewisburg, Bucknell U.P., 2010, 247 pp., asserts the need to define a literary canon for Hispanic Studies and frames her argument within primarily US data and an instructive blend of quantitive analysis and qualitative interpretation that points to unfortunate gaps with regard to gender, geography, politics, and linguistic research, ending with a call for a flexible, core-based canon. Doing a sterling job at presenting a rather different version from that usually given, Christine Arkinstall, Histories, Culture, and National Identity: Women Writing Spain, 1877–1984, Lewisburg U.P., 2009, 250 pp., examines literary contributions by women authors to the Liberal project in the 20th c., analysing in separate sections Rosario de Acuña’s plays, Amor a la patria, Tribunales de venganza, and El Padre Juan within the Liberal debate proper, Ángela Figueroa’s poetic anthologies Belleza cruel and Toco la tierra: Letanías to exemplify how she subverted the official discourse by imbuing Catholic iconography with new meanings designed to expose the cruelty of the Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship, and using current theories on culture, memory, and trauma to explore how Rosa Chacel’s novels Barrio de maravillas and Acrópolis propose education and social commitment to ensure a democratic Spain for a new generation; while the same author in ‘Making Free-thinking Spain: The Sociopolitical Poetics of Belén de Sárraga (c. 1873–1950)’, REH, 44, 2010:81–105, breaks with the androcentric model of the 1898 Generation by rehabilitating yet another of the foremothers of the imaginary and making of Liberal Spain; again, in ‘The Novellas of Republican Intellectual Ángeles López de Ayala (Seville 1856-Madrid 1926)’, BSS, 88:667–90, she initiates the recovery of another remarkable trajectory in Republican politics and freethinking culture in two novellas published in Republican periodicals that López de Ayala herself founded and edited in Barcelona. The first, El abismo, an incomplete folletín of 1896, and the second, Primitivo, published between 1906 and 1907, a didactic novella that defends rationalist education, both promote Republican values among an interclassist reading public, and vindicate the necessity of alliances among the upper middle, middle, and working classes to effect sociopolitical transformation, all of which demonstrates well the writer’s dedication to forging the modern woman as true citizen. Also novel, but of a different political stripe, D. Avila, ‘No Happy Endings: Carmen de Icaza’s (Anti)romance Novels’, RCEH, 35:491–512, finds a subversive message in ¡Quién sabe!, Soñar la vida, and El tiempo vuelve that tempers the usual view of Icaza as mouthpiece for the Sección Feminina del Falange and the message of domesticity and subservience, and instead underscores the pessimism, trauma, and concern about the effects of the Civil War on Spanish society, all of which counterbalances the romance novel formula used with such success in her earlier novel Cristina Guzmán, profesora de idiomas. Literature, 1898-1936 169 Various studies enlighten readers with original points of view. M. T. Pao, ‘“Dad vigor a mi lengua”: Orality and costumbrismo in Gutiérrez Solana’s Madrid’, RCEH, 35:557–75, examines in a most convincing manner elements of traditional street balladry in the vendors’ cries in G. S.’s artistic inventions that transform a realist costumbrismo into something very close to vanguard writing in his phantasmagoric creation of turn-of-the century Madrid. Using the excellent collection of materials in the Museo del Bandolero founded in 1995 in Ronda, A. Sinclair, ‘Thinking in pictures: wrongdoers and their re-formulation’, Longhurst Vol., 109–19, is entertaining on the use of Spanish Dick Turpins in novels of the 20th c. that revisit the ‘heroic’ period of Spain’s political past in the form of the revolution of 1868, starting with the reformulation of the popular characterizations of banditry that circulated in the early 19th c. and after in order to examine in detail how Baroja and Valle-Inclán, respectively, in the novels, La feria de los discretos (1905) and the first two volumes of the trilogy, El ruedo ibérico, La corte de los milagros (1927), and Viva mi dueño (1928), take set pieces of the culture of wrongdoing in Spain in order to weave them into disaffected narratives of modernity. On a different tack, J. Herrero-Senés, ‘El resurgimiento católico de entreguerras (1918–1936) a través del prisma español’, RCEH, 35:373–92, sees renewed Catholicism as the countermovement to the much touted nihilism and sense of crisis prevalent between the two World Wars and points to the Spanish dimension outlined by writers like Marichalar, Díaz Plaja, Muñoz Arconada, Chabás, and Bergamín who read and quoted Chesterton, Belloc, Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, and Henri Massis in publications like Revista de Occidente, La Gaceta Literaria, and Cruz y Raya, as they cited religion and tradition as viable options to combat relativism and scepticism. Plumbing the depths, Robert A. Davidson, Jazz Age Barcelona, Toronto U.P., 2009, 214 pp., takes a hard look at the Catalan capital in the Roaring Twenties, and in six chapters transports us through the ‘spatial practice’ of jazz in nightclubs, cocktail hours, music halls, cabarets, brothels, and drug use in a city comparable to Paris and Berlin, reading the review El escándalo and Francesc Madrid’s novel Sangre en Ataranzas concerning the red-light district, listening to the frenzied, syncopated beat of American music in Sebastià Gasch’s cultural commentaries, perusing Mirador, a weekly literary and artistic paper that combined a ‘European’ cultural point of view with a political agenda for Catalan nationhood, including some fascinating original photos from the graphics journal Imatges, and ending with an analysis of the cocktail hour from Josep Maria de Segarra’s Aperitiu and Vida privada outlining the metaphorical hangover of moral degradation. In the back and forth from right to left: M. Pulido Mendoza, ‘A la búsqueda del “Genio de España”: Giménez Caballero, psicógrafo superrealista de Manuel Azaña’, BHS, 88:43–58, documents well how G.C. was one of the first to create a black legend around the figure of Azaña by systematically using constructs later employed in much Francoist historiography, and notes particularly his equivocal misreading of Azaña’s own literary works as first-person autobiography to give credence to some degrading anecdotes, the application of para- scientific ideas and Freudian ‘pyschography’ popular at the time, as well as the use of avant-garde techniques such as distancing and collage to produce a deformed and caricaturesque portrait of the statesman in a work notable for its biased use of anecdote and rumour. E. Afinoguénora, ‘Leisure and Agrarian Refrom: Liberal Governance in the Travelling Museums of Spanish Misiones Pedagógicas (1931–1933)’, HR, 79:261–90, examines the philosophical underpinning of the program of bringing itinerant art museums to rural areas in Spain by re-reading Manuel Cossío’s theory of leisure to argue that the use of art education for the underprivileged both exemplified krausista philosophy and the Misiones’s emphasis on fomenting the spirit of citizenship in an experiment in liberal governance in response to the urgent political need to implement a democratic policy for ruling the masses. Gina Herrman, Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain, Urbana, Illinois U.P., 2010, 246 pp., studies intelligently and with feeling the autobiographical writings of .

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