The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain (review)

Wadda Ríos-Font has undertaken a most ambitious project in this book, in which she examines a chronologically wide-ranging series of texts that, to her mind, are examples of what she calls "frontier" texts, works that, "at one time or another [. . .] have been deemed just 'outside' literature" (11), either because of the discursive genre to which they belong or because of a perceived lack of "quality." In doing so, she examines issues of canon formation within the specific context of modern Spanish literature, drawing frequently on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Brooks, and Stanley Fish, as well as on John Guillory's 1993 book, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: U of Chicago P). The author is careful to warn the reader that her study is not "about" so-called popular or non-canonical literature (11), but rather about texts that, because of their liminal status, oblige us to question our assumptions about how we structure literary history and about our critical practices themselves.

In the Introduction, Ríos-Font reflects on the tensions inherent in the current practices of literary criticism (implicitly, in the U.S. and Great Britain especially), in which an orientation toward cultural studies, and the theoretical preoccupations it brings with it, is undercut by the very exercise of literary criticism, which, for her, is based on the assumption "that one already knows what literature is, and can recognize the fundamental character and corpus of one's discipline" (15). She also presents key theories of literary production upon which she intends to draw in her discussion of the primary texts: Bourdieu's notion of literature as part of a large "field of cultural production"; Guillory's historicization of canon formation and his reference to works that have been shelved away in the "archive," rather than placed into circulation as part of a canon; and, most surprisingly (because the theoretical framework draws on a substantially different tradition), Itamar Even-Zohar's work on "polysystem theory," which considers literature and other "semiotic phenomena" as parts of several interacting systems of communication (27). Even-Zohar's work is used sparingly throughout the study. Guillory's notion of archive is not referred to again after the Introduction until the last chapter (216). We will see the strong influence of Bourdieu's ideas, however, throughout the rest of the book.

The chapters comprising the textual studies are divided into two parts, one containing two chapters dedicated to studies of texts from the nineteenth century; the other containing three chapters on texts from the twentieth century. This section is followed by the Afterword. Chapter 1 ("Refashioning the Canon: The Nineteenth-Century Serial Novel") examines the serial novel and discusses works by Manuel Fernández y González (Los desheredados, 1857) and Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco (María, o la hija de un jornalero, 1845–46). Chapter 2 ("Benito Pérez Galdós and the Canon of Spanish Literature") is dedicated to a consideration of Galdós's literary criticism, his theater (Realidad), his journalistic work—especially his account of El crimen de la calle de Fuencarral—and the epistolary novel La incógnita. Chapter 3 ("Literature and Propaganda: Agustín de Foxá's and Ramón J. Sender's Novels of the Civil War") contrasts two "novelas de tesis" of the Civil War: one, Madrid de corte a checa, written by a fascist; and one by the better-known Sender, who fought on the Republican side in the war and whose Contraataque hovers on the border of fiction and war memoir.

Up to this point, the author has discussed works which are ordered chronologically, from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1880s and then up to the two 1938 Civil War novels. Chapter 4, however, represents a partial loop back chronologically, in that it considers erotic novels of the two Spanish fines de siglo, juxtaposing a brief consideration of Felipe Trigo's Alma en...