Imagined Truths: Realism in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture ed. by Mary L. Coffey, Margot Versteeg (review)

Modern Spanish Literary and Cultural Studies have seen a recent turn from traditional appreciations of Spain as a stunted nation suffering from a belated and incomplete modernization and its cultural productions as imitative derivations of British and French models. Instead, recent scholarship shifts the focus of analysis away from notions of lacking and inadequacy to yield more productive readings of Spanish cultural production as a valuable example of the distinctive manifestations of modernity beyond Hegel's "heart of Europe". Mary L. Coffey and Margot Versteeg's co-edited volume, Imagined Truths: Realism in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture, utilizes this approach as a fresh take on Spanish realism, the most accomplished authors and works of which have been long omitted from mainstream examinations of modern Western Literature. As a number of contributions in this volume demonstrate, however, a more nuanced analysis of Spain's literary and cultural production reveals a mastery of the complexities of realism and a unique engagement with modernity that not only parallel those of its Northern European counterparts, but in some cases also anticipate cultural, aesthetic, and scientific developments taking place in the late nineteenth century and beyond.

The aims of this collection align with the scholarship of editors Coffey and Versteeg, whose work consistently calls into question the marginalization of both Spain within European Literary and Cultural Studies as well as of those works and genres often neglected within Hispanic Studies themselves. Versteeg's books, for example, reclaim the value of those cultural productions often considered of lesser scholarly value despite their ideological and cultural impact, including illustrated periodicals (Jornaleros de la pluma), género chico plays (De fusiladeros y morcilleros), and Emilia Pardo Bazán's foray into theater (Propuestas para reconstruir una nación). Coffey likewise has demonstrated the role of costumbrismo in the construction of (post-) imperial and (proto-) national identity within a transatlantic framework, and her recent book, The Ghosts of Colonies Past and Present: Spanish Imperialism in the Fiction of Benito Pérez Galdós, emphasizes how Spain's position on the brink of postcolonial nation affords its fin-de-siècle literature a unique, rather than imitative, position in relation to those of England and France.

Fittingly, Imagined Truths engages literary forms, texts, and time periods outside the bounds of realism in its strictest aesthetic and historical definition—including British quixotic fiction in translation (Jaffe), intimate epistolary correspondence (Patiño Eirín), twentieth-century theatrical adaptation (Gies), and postwar detective fiction (Sieburth), among others—as a means of considering the movement's antecedents and legacies as well as its networks of influence in Spain and abroad. Particularly notable in this respect is the volume's engagement with costumbrismo, the scholarly appreciation of which was once limited to its documentation of the idiosyncrasies of Spanish culture in the nineteenth century. A number of chapters in Imagined Truths demonstrate the genre's anticipation of realist strategies or, in the case of Joyce Tolliver's "Colonialism, Collages, and Thick Description: Pardo Bazán and the Rhetoric of Detail", the realist incorporation of costumbrista elements imbued with layers of historical and cultural meaning associated with the metropolitan experience of empire and its end. Especially pathbreaking among these new approximations is Rebecca Haidt's chapter, "Money, Capital, Monstrosity: Metaphorical Matrices of Reality in Antonio Flores's Ayer, hoy y mañana", which illuminates the costumbrista writings of Flores as a nuanced commentary on the consequences of capital and credit on the collective psyche that not only anticipates realist themes and techniques but also evokes Marxist theory.

Aside from breathing new life into neglected forms and texts of modern Spanish literature, Imagined Truths features the work of a number of the field's most influential names, whose interventions actively contribute to the ongoing task of unraveling realism's complex mechanisms and the intricate layers of representation in the modern era. For example, Linda Willem, Susan McKenna, and Maryellen...