Azuela and the Mexican Underdogs by Stanley L. Robe (review)

172ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW her success, in fact, is that she invites this kindof engagement and dialogue. Nardo is always lucid, she has synthesized a great deal of material in a small compass (her own book is sonnetlike), and her thematic clusters illuminate Milton's magisterial transformation of the sonnet from a personal cri de coeur to a poem that preserves its lyric intensity while it addresses compelling values and ideals. ELIZABETH McCUTCHEON, University of Hawaii at Manoa Stanley L. Robe. Azuela and the Mexican Underdogs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. 233p. Two notable differences between Latin American and Anglo-American literary scholarship are the predominance in literary scholarship of biographical studies and textual criticism, (in the sense of the preparation of accurate and documented scholarly editions). Latin American literary scholarship has few studies of these two types reflecting the greater emphasis on the sociocultue of literature in Latin America (and, more recently, the influence of European models of structuralism and semiology) and the lack of the sort of bibliographic and technical control that makes documentary biographies and critical editions possible. Doris Meyers's recent biography of Victoria Ocampo (New York: Braziler, 1978) is an excellent example of the sort of literary biography that only rarely appears in Latin American studies, and Robe's critical edition of Azuela's Los de abajo is a superb example of a scholarly edition of a major literary work. Robe's book is divided into four chapters: "Mariano Azuela and the Villistas in Jalisco", which provides the sociocultural and biographical backgrounds of the writing of Los de abajo and its concrete historical references, "Los de abajo in El Paso, Texas," which is a study of the publication of the novel in its first edition in the Texas Spanish language newspaper, El Paso del Norte (of particular note is the section on "Significance of the Two Versions" — i.e., the Texas version and the one ultimately published in Mexico), "Los de abajo: the Text from El Paso del Norte", and "The Underdogs: Translation of the Text." Robe's careful consideration of the biographical and textual issues associated with Azuela's novel should serve as a model for similar editions of other major Latin American works for which we know textual problems exist but for which we do not have reliable studies. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER, Arizona State University Edith Randam Rogers. The Perilous Hunt: Symbols in Hispanic and European Balladry. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1980. 177p. The author points out that because the necessary groundwork of ballad research has been centered on collection, classification and establishing of genealogies, an unintentional side effect has been that ballads have been neglected as a focus of literary analysis. The aim of her investigation is, therefore, to analyse the poetic expression of ballads through a study of their component elements, most specifically recurrent imagery, which has tended to be overlooked because, through the "economy " of ballad language, images are normally not displaced but continue to coexist on the denotative level at the same time as they take on a symbolic meaning. For example, a girl combing her hair may in one context (say, sitting alone by the seashore) also symbolize that she is faithfully awaiting the return of her lover, while in another context (perhaps frivolously sitting on her balcony) that she is lasciv- ...