Hispanism

Abstract: Setting aside the pastiche of bullfighters and flamenco dancers that has dominated the U.S. image of Spain for more than a century, this innovative volume uncovers the roots of Spanish studies to explain why the diversity, vitality, and complexity of Spanish history and culture have been reduced in U.S. accounts to the equivalent of a tourist brochure. Spurred by the complex colonial relations between the United States and Spain, the new field of Spanish studies offered a way for the young country to reflect a positive image of itself as a democracy, in contrast with perceived Spanish intolerance and closure. "Spain in America" investigates the political and historical forces behind this duality, surveying the work of the major nineteenth-century U.S. Hispanists in the fields of history, art history, literature, and music. A distinguished panel of contributors offers fresh examinations of the role of U.S. writers, especially Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in crafting a wildly romantic vision of Spain. They examine the views of such scholars as William H. Prescott and George Ticknor, who contrasted the "failure" of Spanish history with U.S. exceptionalism. Other essays explore how U.S. interests in Latin America consistently colored its vision of Spain and how musicology in the United States, dominated by German migrs, relegated Spanish music to little more than a footnote. Also included are profiles of the philanthropist Archer Mitchell Huntington and the pioneering art historians Georgiana Goddard King and Arthur Kingsley Porter, who spearheaded U.S. interest in the architecture and sculpture of medieval Spain. Providing a much-needed look at the development and history of Hispanism, "Spain in America" opens the way toward confronting and modifying reductive views of Spain that are frozen in another time.

Abstract: Introduction: The Spanish Golden Age Drama Juan Ruiz de Alarcon y Mendoza by James A. Parr Francisco Antonio de Bances Candamo by Santiago Garcia Castano'n Pedro Calderon de la Barca by Matthew D. Stroud Guillen de Castro by Barbara Mujica Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra by Edward H. Friedman AndREs de Claramonte y Corroy by Christopher B. Weimer Juan de la Cueva by David G. Burton Juan del Encina by Stanislav Zimic Antonio Mira de Amescua by Manuel Delgado Morales Tirso de Molina (Gabriel TEllez) by Bruno M. Damiani Juan Perez de Montalban by Patricia Kenworthy Agustin Moreto y Cabana by Frank P. Casa Luis Quinones de Benavente by Diane Iglesias Fernando de Rojas by Mary Parker Francisco de Rojas y Zorrilla by Anita K. Stoll Lope de Rueda by Sharon D. Voros Bartolome de Torres Naharro by John Lihani Lope Felix de Vega Carpio by Alix Ingber Luis Velez de Guevara by C. George Peale Selected Bibliography Index

Abstract: OF DISSERTATION FAUSTIAN FIGURES: MODERNITY AND MALE (HOMO)SEXUALITIES IN SPANISH COMMERCIAL LITERATURE, 1900-1936 I contend in this study that commercial novels and theater from early twentiethcentury Spain often present male (homo)sexual characters as a point of constellation for anxieties regarding modernization in Madrid and Barcelona. In works by Jacinto Benavente, Josep Maria de Sagarra, El Caballero Audaz (Jose Maria Carretero), Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, Carmen de Burgos, Alvaro Retana, Eduardo Zamacois, and Alfonso Hernandez-Cata, concerns about technological and socioeconomic change converge upon hustlers and blackmailers, queer seducers, and chaste inverts. I examine these figures alongside an allegorical interpretation of Goethe’s Faust in Marshall Berman’s book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982) in order to foreground their varying responses to modern innovation. They alternately sell themselves to prosper under consumer capitalism, seduce others into savoring the pleasures of city life, or fall tragically to the conflicting pressures of tradition and change. In the process, they reveal the fear and enthusiasm of their creators vis-a-vis rapid urbanization, fluctuating class hierarchies, the commercialization of art, and the medicalization of sex from the turn of the nineteenth century to the Spanish Civil War. From a methodological standpoint, I argue that close readings of commercial works are worthwhile for what they reveal about the discursive framing of modernity and male (homo)sexualities in Spain in the early 1900s. Hence, I use techniques of literary analysis previously reserved for canonical writers such as Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Cernuda to discuss texts produced by their bestselling contemporaries, none of whom has been equally scrutinized by subsequent criticism. Existing scholarship on modernity and sexuality in Spain and abroad helps contextualize my detailed interpretations. Although my project is not a sustained exercise in comparative literature, I do situate Spanish works within historical and literary trends beyond Spain so as to acknowledge the interplay of transnational and local concerns surrounding modern change and sexual customs. By considering the primary texts in relation to varying temporal and geographic contexts, the dissertation aims to be of interest to a readership in and outside Hispanism, and to supplement important studies of modernity, (homo)sexualities, and literature that overlook Spain.

Abstract: For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the "first modem novel." Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which "great books" like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette's La princesse de Clives (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia.' The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism's quest for the "first modem novel" has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modem one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an "aleph": an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all at-