Academias valencianas del barroco: Descripción y diccionario de poetas (review)

Reviews¿03 The introduction to the volume includes eleven pages treating Maria de Zayas's life and literary works within the context of other Golden Age women playwrights, a thoughtful analysis ofthe play edited, an outline of the versification of the play by acts only, followed by a two-page treatment by both the editor and translator of their respective approaches to editing and translating, and finally four pages ofvaluable bibliography on Maria de Zayas's writings in all genres, with a short section ofbibliography on language, translation, and theater. Larson's decision to provide a prose translation ofthe polymetric verse text (28-29) is totally legitimate. She has provided a readable prose version of the play which translates quite faithfully the original text. There were, however, several instances in which a subjunctive verb form should have been rendered as a "may" or "let" construction instead of a statement of fact (see w. 629, 1518, 2570, and 2573). Just from the standpoint of efficient textual comparisons , it would, I believe, have been preferable to print the English prose version closer to the line-by-line verse divisions in Spanish, instead ofso many dense paragraphs of continuous text. Zayas's play, treating the common themes oflove, honor, andjealousy, has received considerable critical attention, as outlined in the introduction and reflected in the very complete bibliography accompanying the edition . Hegstrom suggests that Zayas inverts and subverts comedia conventions (26) and that the play illustrates Julia Kristeva's theory (20-21) that a work structured on the basis ofbipolar opposition (the three noble couples that plan to marry at the end ofthe play) must negate the middle (the character Fenisa). Hegstrom and Larson have provided Comedia students and scholars a valuable tool which expands our knowledge of this dramatic text ofone of Spain's better-known Golden Age women writers. Carol Bingham Kirby State University College at Buffalo Mas i Usó, Pasqual. Academias valencianas del barroco: Descripción y diccionario de poetas. Estudios de Literatura 49. Kassel: Reichenberger, 1999. 587 pp. Academias valencianas del barroco is an exhaustive study ofthe twenty -five literary academies, including two fictitious ones that appear in 204BCom, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2003) novels, that existed in Valencia between the years 1591-1705. Using published and unpublished seventeenth-century documents, Pasqual Mas i Usó provides detailed information about the history, organization, membership , and literary activity of the academies that were an integral component of Golden Age Valencia's social milieu. The comprehensive nature ofthis groundbreaking study represents a valuable contribution to Golden Age studies and an important source of information for subsequent researchers, especially sociologists, historians, and scholars of Golden Age Spain. Mas i Usó's study consists ofa Prólogo, Introducción, Catálogo bibliográfico, Corpus Académico, Diccionario de Poetas y Académicos, and índice de Primeros Versos. In the Prólogo Mas i Usó explains that Academias valencianas del barroco evolved from his doctoral dissertation of nearly 2,000 pages. Besides the current study, the dissertation, under the direction of Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros of the University of Valencia, served as the basis for a chapter in De las academias a la Enciclopedia (1999), an edition of José Orti y Moles's manuscript Academia a las Señoras de 1698 (1995), Academiasyjustas literarias en la Valencia barroca (1995), and an anthology titled Poesía académica valenciana (1998). In the latest study, Mas i Usó explores the social, literary, and historical significance ofthe literary academies ofValencia, mentioning specifics, such as names of members and their nicknames, the location and dates of meetings , the topics proposed and discussed at the meetings, anecdotes of what transpired at the meetings, the rales and regulations by which each academy operated, and the titles ofeach academy's poems and plays. The description of several of the academies includes the complete text of the poems as well. The author informs us in the Introducción that there were twice as many academies in the second half of the seventeenth century as there were in the first half. There were two types of academies: ordinarias and de ocasión. Nobles were the only ones permitted to occupy positions of authority in the...