In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Resenas ca 175 One final note: while the arguments of each chapter are adequately documented, some further bibliographical references would lend depth and weight to her ideas, particularly in the religious sphere: the mutual debt of hagiographic and epic conventions, the notion of imitatio Christi, the historical construction of sanctity, the history of Jewish/ Christian relations are some of the areas, for example, where more scholarship might usefully have been cited to support and qualify her arguments. Roger Boase's important article on the antisemitic undercurrents of the morisco expulsion would have helped not only her discussion of Rufo's La Austriada, but also her (in my view too reductive) suggestion that "anti-Semitism may actually have served as the Urtext for the writing of alterity in Golden Age epic, generally" (205). Antonio Rodriguez Monino's monograph on the "construction critica y realidad hist6rica" of Golden Age literature would definitely have helped her introductory discussion of canon formation: how long will it take scholars to draw its full implications? Recognizing the influence of Juan de Mena's epic Las trescientas would be a start. The lack of a single heroic figure, the contradictory mood of triumphalism and disillusion, the apostrophes to the monarch and the accompanying discourse of royal service, the use of prophecy, the admiration for Lucan, are just some of the features that Golden Age epic poets would have found modelled in this early modern best-seller. Julian Weiss King's College London Brownlee, Marina S. The Cultural Labyrinth of Maria de Zayas. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. xvi + 214 pp. ISBN 08122 -3537-1. If the recent boom of critical editions, articles, dissertations, conference sessions, and more importantly, book-length studies on Maria de Zayas are evidence, then there should remain no doubts that this early modern prose writer, poet, and dramatist finally has been given her due and allowed to join the ranks of Cervantes, Quevedo, and Calderon in the literary canon of Golden Age authors. The shift in theoretical approaches that encouraged a questioning of the traditional male-dominant literary canon during the final decades of the twentieth century undoubtedly inspired the reconsideration of Zayas that has resulted in the recent surge in publications. Not surprisingly, while most of the latest works on Zayas focus on the representation of gender in her writings, the ways in which this broad topic is treated vary significantly. 176 BO Reviews Marina Brownlee's new book is no exception as it begins with a feminist and narratological framework to explore multiple subject positions in Zayas's prose but then goes beyond the dated feminism and narratology of earlier Zayas studies from twenty or thirty years ago to consider how a postmodern sensibility can help make sense of an unstable Baroque aesthetic in the contradictory imperial context of early modern Spain. What I found particularly pertinent for this projed was her discussion of the tension that surfaces in Zayas's text as a result of the exploration of surveillance, voyeurism, and gossip in seventeenth -century Spanish society. Brownlee repeatedly and persuasively argues that Zayas's work consistently breaks down the "possibility of constructing ironclad categories of race, gender, or class" (69). In other words, like Cervantes's work, in Zayas we find a polyvalence (and perhaps ambivalence) of ideologies, seemingly eager to either celebrate and/or indict traditional patriarchal values. While a much more indepth analysis of the representation of race needs to be explored in Zayas's fiction, Brownlee's study provides a good beginning where many other scholarly works merely gloss over or completely ignore this issue. Equally engaging in this study is Brownlee's treatment of readership and the early modern popularity of tabloid-style publications that informed Zayas and her perception of what would intrigue her readers . This emphasis on reception is continued in the separate discussions of certain stories by analyzing how the partygoers/listeners of the sarao responded to the narrations. Thus Brownlee makes a thoughtful connection between the framestory, the tales, and how we can talk about a pornographic configuration in her work that is different from the early assessments of Zayas's work as obscene and filthy. Of course considering that...

pdf