Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán ed. by Margot Versteeg and Susan Walter (review)

This volume is #147 in the Modern Language Association's lauded Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series, and it is gratifying to see that this important Spanish author has gotten the MLA treatment. As the editors correctly state in the preface to their volume, "no single label accurately describes the richness of [Emilia Pardo Bazán's] vast production": novels, short fiction, essays, travel narratives, plays, even cookbooks (ix). The contributors—a who's who of Pardo Bazán scholarship—succeed in matching this richness by offering an equally eclectic variety of pedagogical approaches as a guide to teaching the varied works of this prolific author.

Thus, the 23 articles included in the section entitled "Approaches" (Part Two), are distributed among five topics: "Gendered Perspectives"; "Science and Medicine"; "Nation, Empire, and Geopolitics"; "Realism, Naturalism, and Literary Connections"; and "Interdisciplinary Approaches." "Gendered Perspectives" includes explorations of feminism, female subjectivity, the Angel in the House, and—interestingly—masculinity, written by Maryellen Bieder, Isabel Clúa, Lisa Nalbone, and Zachary Erwin. "Science and Medicine" deals with aspects of evolution, race, technology, and medicine in offerings by Lou Charnon-Duetsch, Dale J. Pratt, and Erika M. Sutherland. "Nation, Empire, and Geopolitics" includes articles on postcolonialism, empire, national identity, social class, and regionalism, written by Helena Miguélez-Carballeira, Joyce Tolliver, Rebecca Ingram, and Francisca González-Arias. "Realism, Naturalism, and Literary Connections" expands Pardo Bazán's work beyond the Spanish realism and Naturalism for which she is most known to also explore her theater and journalism, as well as her place in the broader European context in articles by Hazel Gold, Íñigo Sánchez-Llama, Denise Dupont, Susan M. McKenna, Harriet Turner, and Margot Versteeg. Finally, "Interdisciplinary Approaches" includes articles by Linda M. Willem, Carmen Pereira-Muro, María Luisa Guardiola and Susan Walter, Alicia Cerezo, Javier Torre, and Jennifer Smith exploring film, painting, geography, travel writing, and translation in relation to Pardo Bazán's oeuvre.

This main body of the volume is complemented by a section entitled "Materials" (Part One) that discusses teaching resources, including collections of Pardo Bazán's works; available translations of her works; and critical, historical, electronic, and audiovisual resources. This section also includes a useful literary and historical time line of Pardo Bazán's life. The volume is concluded by an extensive global bibliography, and two indexes, one onomastic and one of Pardo Bazán's works.

The volume's format—the "Materials" and "Approaches" sections, the global bibliography, the indexes, the translation of all non-English words and quotes—will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series. As with previous volumes of the series, this one is designed for use as much for faculty new to its topic as for specialists; as much for a world- or comparative-literature course taught in translation as for a course taught in the target language, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level.

Indeed, by translating all Spanish quotations and, thanks to Lisa Nalbone, even an entire article into English, this collection goes far in facilitating the discovery of Emilia Pardo Bazán by professors and students who may be quite familiar with the likes of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and George Eliot, but not with the most influential Spanish woman writer of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The mere existence of this volume, with its use of English translation, contributes further, then, to the de-marginalization of Spain within the arena of world literatures.

Helena Miguélez-Carballeira mentions in her article certain dimensions of Pardo Bazán's work that "may not spring readily to mind," and it is precisely this aspect of this volume as a whole that is so satisfying (86). That is, these articles present a diversity of approaches, methods, and "original, classroom-tested teaching tools" such as syllabi, classroom...