Echoes and Inscriptions: Comparative Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literatures by ed. Barbara A. Simerka, Christopher B. Weimar (review)

104 Reviews D Simerka, Barbara A., and Christopher B. Weimar, eds. Echoes and Inscriptions: Comparative Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literatures. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell UP / London: Associated UPs, 2000. HB. 278 pp. ISBN 0-8387-5430-9. The comparative essays of Echoes and Inscriptions evoke the interwoven threads of competing ideological discourses embedded in early modern texts, an approach which proves to be a solid strategy for reevaluating the significance of Renaissance and Baroque Spanish literature. Barbara Simerka and Christopher Weimer, who have a history of collaboration as cofounders and coeditors of the electronic journal Laberinto, bring together contributors who reconsider a number of issues of literary history, such as the formation of the novel or the influence of Spanish letters in England, France, and LatinAmerica, within current critical discussions of Arab and Jewish cultural strands in peninsular literature, the nature of the rise of European imperialism, and questions of gender and subjectivity. As the editors state, the premise of this approach is the necessity of reexamining the question of influence, via Thomas Greene, by regarding the imitatio characteristic of Renaissance humanism as a rich mode of writing that does not just draw upon preceding texts, but also deconstructively challenges, as well as imbues them with renewed interpretive and artistic potential. Their introduction provides a synopsis of the 16 essays meant to “resuscitate and resignify Iberian Renaissance and Baroque writings”(9), which have been organized into four parts: I: The Politics of Discourse, II: Textual Strategies, III. Subjectivity and Identity, and IV. The Discourse of Politics. There are contributions by each of the editors as well as by Walter Cohen, Margaret Greer,Amy R. Williamsen, Salvador Oropesa, Sidney Donnell, Salvador J. Fajardo, James A. Parr, Anne J. Cruz, Amy Pawl, Thomas P. Finn, William Blue, Diana de Armas Wilson, Perry Gethner, and Frederick A. de Armas. The central impression left upon this reader of the collection is that narrative, and the works of Cervantes in particular, provide a tremendously significant portal for the ongoing project of comparative approaches meant to link early modern Spain to a global literary continuum, since seven of the authors chose to deal significantly with Cervantine texts. Cohen’s compelling explanation for this focus in Part I is that for a number of reasons, some familiar, some not, the establishment of this portal is still fluid and very much in process, an assertion which other essays of the volume corroborate. The dominance of Anglophone studies continues to shift because of the increased interest in Latin American cultures emerging from colonial and postcolonial criticism. Also Cohen looks back to the central place Reseñas 105 D Renaissance and Baroque peninsular literature held for the German Romantics and he argues against the accepted conception that Spain is unique and peripheral to Europe, positing instead that it presents a model European country with the most typical of literatures because of its Semitic past, its account of imperialism, and its importance in the formation of the novel. He asserts that a thorough understanding of the “porousness” evident in Renaissance and Baroque peninsular literature is a key to the character of European literature, and relatedly, that our critics might also be revalued; in landscape of twentiethcentury literary criticism an Américo Castro deserves as important a place as an Ernst Curtius. Cervantes is also central to De Armas Wilson’s assertion that there is a radical Erasmian humanism coming out of the Spanish Renaissance, a recognition that requires a revision of JoséAntonio Maravall’s reading of the utopian subtext in Don Quijote. She demonstrates that Maravall’s critical stance on the escapism and evasion of reality represented in the Quijote is limited by his solely peninsular focus, and she argues that colonial letters and chronicles provided highly significant material for parody that expands the scope of Cervantes’s critique. Pawl’s reading of Charlotte Lennox’s 1752 Female Quixote provides a fascinating example of eighteenth-century English novel’s debt to Cervantes, showing how the genre of Romance made the power to represent “A utopian gynocracy” available to women, if only to unfortunately end with a diminished protagonist that “has dwindled into a wife” (15253 ). I cannot do justice to...