Resonare silvas: La tradición bucólica en la poesía del siglo XVI (review)
exemplary in its treatment of major and minor poets and currents. In his outline of the antecedents of the novel in sixteenth-century Spain, Michael Gerli looks at romance (sentimental, chivalric, pastoral, Moorish, Byzantine), late humanistic comedy, the picaresque, folkloric stories, and “blurred genres,” and he adds an acknowledgment of “the problems of taxonomy.” Anthony Close’s essay on Cervantes aims to resolve what the critic sees as a conflict between seventeenthcentury perceptions of Don Quixote and later readings. Close succinctly places Cervantes’s masterpiece within the complete works, but the primary point of the essay is to build upon his earlier groundbreaking studies of the influence of Romanticism on interpretations of the novel and of its protagonist: here he pays special attention to Erich Auerbach. The call for a focus on “grey” matters in the text is powerfully articulated, but not totally convincing, because it is predicated on a correction of the “misconceptions” of others. Mary Gaylord merges the “culture,” rhetorical and conceptual flourishes, and subjects of Baroque poetry, with special nods, as one would imagine, to Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora, and Francisco de Quevedo. Describing the development of a national theater, Margaret Greer addresses the structure and content of the plays, the major dramatists, performance spaces, the emergence of theatrical companies, and contrasts between the corrales and court spectacles. She sets the stage, as it were, for essays by Victor Dixon on Lope de Vega and by Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros on Calderón; the two essays convey the range and the depth of the plays, and the latter contains a fascinating aside on “the heterodoxies of a conservative.” In the closing essay of the section, Jorge Checa comments on didactic prose, history, political treatises, life writing, and the crónicas de Indias. He starts with Antonio de Guevara and ends with Baltasar Gracián, and he brings social and gender issues into this somewhat amorphous yet highly important amalgam of genres. Gies and his collaborators recognize the irony of a search for objective literary history, and they use this irony to their advantage. They negotiate the old and the new with relative ease. Their scholarly criteria are rigorous, and their subjective critical acumen becomes part of the frame. Along with the factual information that is associated with manuals of literature, this history bears the imprint of distinct and compelling analytical processes. The book is an admirable reference tool and a treat to read. EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN Vanderbilt University