A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature by Scott M. DeVries (review)

Scott DeVries’ study of Spanish American literary history seeks to fill a gap in current academic discourse as it relates to ecology, environmentalism, and ecocritical postures towards literature. Current criticism focuses on specific authors, texts, or historical moments, and this book aims to link them all together to show a more complex history of ecological ideas as represented in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. To this end DeVries privileges the “analysis of the way that Spanish American texts can either articulate and/or criticize political ecologies, ideas about development, and the concerns of ecofeminism” (15) while also exploring the way in which these literary sources may inspire environmentalist sentiment in their audiences.

One of the challenges of a text such as this is that the intellectual community interested in issues around the environment have yet to reach a consensus about the meaning of a number of the key terms that are used repeatedly—ecology, environmentalism, and ecocriticism among them. DeVries takes the reader through some of the proposed ideas, though in the end focuses on two concepts that he returns to throughout the text: canon formation and political ecology. The goals of the project are made clear through these concepts, particularly through the author’s preference for a large literary corpus with which to work and the importance of praxis within and as a response to literature. While there are gestures made towards interpretive frames formulated by ecofeminism and contemporary studies of space and place, they do not figure prominently in the textual analysis that makes up the largest portion of the work.

The book is divided into three sections dealing with texts written in the 19th and early 20th centuries, mid-20th century, and 1980s-present, respectively. The first section looks at links between 19th century environmental history and the civilization/barbarism dichotomy most famously articulated by Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in order to trace a literary counter-narrative that positively valued nature, negatively coded as barbarism by Sarmiento. This part of the book also reads a variety of modernista texts ecocritcally while unpacking troubling authoritarian tendencies and racist implications in a number of works, though the question of gender in this context is underdeveloped. The second section of DeVries’ study looks at three major literary patterns in Latin America: the Jungle novel (de la selva), the Land novel (de la tierra), and indigenista novels in order to expand the body of texts that one might examine from an ecocritical perspective with a special emphasis on the diversity of ecological ideologies expressed. However, most of the novels studied in this section share ethical emphases that involve concern for labor, concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, and ecological degradation.

DeVries’ argument is strongest in the third section, which deals with texts published in the 1980s and beyond, and features the most detailed readings of the novels he interprets ecocritically. Luis Sepúlveda’s El viejo que leía novelas de amor (1989; The Old Man Who Read Love Stories), the touchstone of the entire project, shapes the kind of texts that are selected in the rest of the history. While the narrative innovation characteristic of literature in Spanish in the era studied crosses all subgenres, DeVries chooses to emphasize narrative texts that use environmental concerns in specific ways, calling back to the initial emphasis of the study on literature that privileges praxis. The readings of a series of novels that show the way in which the subversion of genre expectations, irony, humor, innovative imagery, and utopias function convince the reader of the interesting and persuasive perspective put forward by this mode of interpretation.

A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature proposes several engaging readings of both well-known and virtually unkown texts; the focus on narrative is a fresh perspective within this field in Spanish America as a great deal of work has already been done reading lyric verse ecocritically. This...