The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (review)

274 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes Cambridge University Press, 2002 By Anthony J. Cascardi Anthony Close's warning against antihistoricist tendencies that threaten to erase the historical and aesthetic specificity of texts does not apply to this book, which studies a broad range of Cervantes's work and situates it historically within the wide context of early modern, Renaissance literature. The volume includes a neat introduction , an appendix that lists electronic resources and scholarly editions, and ten essays by top-notch scholars who use multiple perspectives of modern literary criticism to analyze Cervantes's prose fiction , drama and poetry. The initial essay by B.W. Ife serves as an excellent introduction to the complex historical and social context of Cervantes's works. It elucidates succinctly and clearly the emergence of Habsburg Spain as a world power and explains how Don Quijote encompasses almost 150 years of Spanish history. The reader comes to understand how Spain had to balance political unity with cultural diversity, maintain a growing number of territories, defend the Cadiolic faith and meet costs for functioning on the international stage. It trears intricate issues regarding the Inquisition , the expulsions of die moriscos and the relationships between nobles and the crown, and it demonstrates how Cervantes, a shrewd observer of his complex world, allowed the circumstantial evidence of his own society to act as testimony to a wide range of issues in his literature. De Armas's article, the highlight of this collection , points out the many memories of Italy in Cervantes's works and offers a superb explanation of how they portray his desire to return to that country. Especially perceptive is his account of how Cervantes's own desire for fame, depicted at the end of Numancia, is connected to his desire for Italy and how the author uses Raphael's Triumph of Galatea to fashion the heroine of his Gabtea. De Armas convincingly demonstrates that for Cervantes, Italy was a locus for imitation, a place where the ruins of the ancients called forth the need for a new civilization that would exalt the dignity of humans, the divinity of painting and poetry and the enchantment of the ancients. Cascardi's admirable essay treats Cervantes's role in the formation of the novel and points out how his new forms originated from the transformation of the old ones. It shows how Don Quijote integrated and transformed preexisting discourses and genres, allowing Cervantes to breed a selfconscious kind of originality into the novel at a time when the old models seemed to have grown stale. Cascardi's article is a good introduction to Alexander Welsh's piece on the influence oÃ- Don Quijote as a renewable source of exceptional, original novels of Western civilization such as Tristram Shandy, A Passage to India, The Idiot, Middkmarch among others. In her study of Cervantes's less famous works, Mary Malcolm Gaylord offers interesting insights into the refracted, self-referential discourse in Gabtea, some novelas ejempbres and Persiks. In the novebs genres are mixed, codes travestied, structures twisted, identities and values are in a state of flux. Malveena McKenrick's article offers valuable perspectives on Cervantes's dramas, especially Numancia and La entretenida. She points out how his entremeses bear witness to illusion and deception and how the boundaries between fact and fiction are permeable. Adrienne Martin's essay demonstrates humor's paradoxical relationship to violence in Cervantes. She studies the classical vein of humor conveyed by irony, satire, burlesque and "fool literature," the festive broadly comic strain of mockery, laughter, slapstick and subtle allusions and the personal invective in Don Quijote. Another highlight of the volume, Anne Cruz's essay, applies the concepts of psyche and gender to study literary representations of the unconscious and the manifestation and repression of desire in Cervantes's fiction. She traces the emergence of psychology and gender as vital categories of analysis, identifies their critical function in Cervantes studies and demonstrates how psychoanalytical approaches coalesce with and demonstrate their reliance on contemporary feminist theories. The mechanisms of psychoanalysis allow the silenced to speak and as die silenced in patriarchal societies include women and the "other," psy- Arizona Journal...