The Voice of the Phoenix: Metaphors of Death and Rebirth in Classics of the Iberian Renaissance by Bryant Creel (review)

RESEÑAS 113 ! ! ! ! ! taken in his provocative queer analysis of hitherto considered heterosexual/traditional ideas, concepts, and texts. This risk taking strategy is sure to engender further discussion and research in the future, an extraordinary achievement in and of itself. Peter E. Thompson Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario . Creel, Bryant. The Voice of the Phoenix: Metaphors of Death and Rebirth in Classics of the Iberian Renaissance. Tempe:Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004. HB. xxv + 371 pp. ISBN Professor Creel brings together in this volume equal amounts of new work and previously published essays that have been reconsidered. The ten chapter topics range from fifteenth-century cancionero poetry through the lyrics of Garcilaso and Fray Luis to the Lazarillo and Cervantes’Don Quijote. In the acknowledgments he expresses “the need to evolve approaches that did not match the existing trends of critical methodology,” and in the introduction he states his belief (with which this reviewer concurs), that, “[c]ritics make too little use of scholarship that is indirectly related to a literary work but that would support a free interpretation of a work’s possible meanings” (xix). In seeking a ground for reading early modern literature in its period context while searching for its meaning in today’s culture, he draws upon a wide range of disciplines, “ethics, aesthetics, analytic psychology, sociology, art history, mythology, symbology, critical theory, religion, theology, historiography, epistemology, and the elusive yet crucial study of ... “the history of sensibility’”(xx) while admitting to “the prominence of Throughout these essays, Professor Creel challenges traditional readings with a polemical posture that emphasizes the psychological perspective of value-driven choices over such traditional concepts as fate. One fine example is his reading of Garcilaso’s Sonnet 1, “Quando me paro a contemplar mi ‘stado.” His interpretation may be summed 0-8669-8315-5. value theory and psychology in this book” (xxiv). 114 REVIEWS ! ! ! ! ! up as follows: “fateful love . . . is both an aesthetic value and a moral value, a character value . . . the felt, internal necessity of nobility of character” (40); “The poems in question lead us to understand that the persona has been willing to offend against a lower, universal moral principle as the ‘fateful’ price for affirming a value of the individual, what for him is a higher moral value” (42); “instead of the persona, in Lapesa’s words, emphasizing ‘submission to fate as an assertion of personal will’ [Estudios, 218], submission to fate is used as a metaphor for the persona’s persistence in his own passionate willing. The “fate” of unhappy love in Garcilaso is not . . . surrender to a power beyond human control; it is an assertion of the will to live” (52). The Voice of the Phoenix is provocative, insightful, and erudite, though at times the weight of the erudition slows the pace of the primary critical idea that underlies these essays: that the literature of the Iberian Renaissance evidences a profound resurgence of a belief in the value of the individual will. In the process of detailing the growth of values such as individuation and self-reliance, he finds that modern heroism One key factor in arriving at his conclusions is his frequent practice of separating the author from the persona of the speaker in a work. (In the case of Garcilaso I, concur with Creel’s reading, though with different results; there is much in Garcilaso’s work to suggest that he felt himself to be a servant of the Spanish/Hapsburg empire.) In the introduction, Professor Creel notes that a great deal of what goes into literary criticism involves the imagination. He asserts that the exercise of free association is inevitable in the process of interpretation, and suggests that we should embrace this challenge, accepting as fact that much of what critics call “meaning” in a work is what they see in it. Professor Creel has taken the opportunity, therefore, to freely challenge a number of traditional readings with his own interpretations. In doing so he has presented us with a lively, wellresearched , and thoughtful volume. Howard B. Wescott State University College at Fredonia becomes combined with irony. ...