The Routledge Companion to Iberian studies ed. by Javier Muñoz-Basols, Laura Lonsdale and Manuel Delgado (review)

The volume, The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies, edited by Professors Muñoz-Basols, Lonsdale, and Delgado for Routledge, undoubtedly offers a long-awaited English-language update to the field of Iberian studies. With a length of almost 700 pages and 50 articles, this book incorporates novel approaches that resituate the old field of Hispanism in a more global and comparative context with renewed objects of study, ranging from graphic novels to performance. This reference work updates and goes beyond pioneering contributions on Iberian diversity made by voices such as Joan Ramon Resina and Sebastiaan Faber since the 2000s. Despite its length and historiographic temporalization, its purpose does not seem to be encyclopaedic, but integrative. The volume is divided into five historical blocks, with two sections that organize each part (“History, Politics and Cultural Studies” and “Literature and Visual Culture”). This confusing decision restricts the variety of approaches among the 50 articles.

The first two blocks—dedicated to the medieval period, early modernity and the Golden Age—have a clear historical focus. For those who approach this volume as a consultation tool, the double dimension of these more historiographic essays is very useful. While they do not necessarily provide very original theses, they both contextualize and provide relevant historical and bibliographical information. The medieval Iberian relationship between its own past and future (the Arab period, the Reconquest) coexists with an analysis of the symbolism of power during the monarchies of Castile and Aragón (Teófilo F. Ruiz), or with more focused essays on the literary form and the politics of translation of the period. Other essays cover spirituality in women’s writing, multilinguistic poetic expressions, and hermeneutics in the masterpiece of the period, the Libro del buen amor. The chapter closes with an original text by Manuel Castiñeiras about the production of visual culture made by the diversity of artistic traditions in Medieval Iberia. Historical analysis is also central to the chapters dedicated to the empire and the Inquisition in early modernity. Other approaches to the period bring historical knowledge and cultural focus simultaneously; this is the case in the texts by E. Michael Gerli and Kathryn M. Mayers with their pictorial and literary study. A mostly achieved balance is sought between novel approaches and the cultural canon; articles on Tirant lo Blanch, Don Quixote, and El Bernardo connect the Middle Ages and the Golden Age, in addition to coexisting alongside literary criticism.

The 19th and 20th centuries are widely studied in the third and fourth sections. Central to the period are essays on the economic and political transformation of the Spanish nation during the 19th century. Jesús Cruz, Jordi Canal, and Javier Fernández Sebastián analyze liberalism from different points of view (the end of imperial vestiges, the Carlism/liberalism dispute, and the evolution of patriotism). The modern city and the new urban planning are topics studied by Benjamin Fraser. While literature is the focus of most of the 19th-century cultural chapter, the Enlightenment is studied through more diverse approaches—painting, folk theatre, and the post-national writing of women.

In the fourth block, The Iberian Peninsula during the Twentieth Century, we find innovative contributions through a deterritorialization of cultural identity as it had been understood by Hispanism historically. Sebastiaan Faber proposes the problem of exile and its understudied cultural production and George Esenwein dives into the delicate question of nationalism during the Civil War (1936-1939). Other texts propose comparative views between Spain and Portugal: two empires in decline over the century, censorship in Franco and Salazar, transitional processes in both countries, and an essay on film production during times of war. Other contributions cover understudied decades of the mid-twentieth century. Brad Epps focuses on Iberian cinematic traditions in the 1960s, from the Nuevo Cine Español to the peripheral Escola de Barcelona and the Novo Cinema Português. David K...