The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1600 to the Present

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2005 by Andrew Ginger

The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1600 to the Present. Ed. by HARRIET TURNER and ADELAIDA LOPEZ MARTINEZ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xxxvi 304 pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-521-77815-8.

This new Cambridge Companion seeks to offer its readership insights into the most striking and fascinating aspects of the Spanish novel. It provides an introductory essay, thirty-one pages on the period up to the 1820s, then two larger sections on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before finishing with an account of writing about writing over the centuries. The Companion permits each of the multiple authors to pursue their own approach, whilem aintaining overall goals of contextualization, theorization, clarity, and coverage. Neither a straightforward reference work nor simply a collection of essays, the book blends strengths from each of these genres, offering a broad knowledge base combined with fully developed critical analysis. At its best, the Companion contains up-to-date insights in accessible, bite-sized chunks.

It is good to see promoted, alongside venerable figures of the old canon, women writers of modernism and earlier, and 1920s avant-garde prose. Those seeking a concise way into contemporary criticism will find essays ranging over issues such as the impact of feminism, the question of representation in the 'Realist' novel, and contextualization with in modernity and postmodernity. The Companion is up to date too in extensively treating the novel since 1960. At times, it offers a beneficial jolt to preconceptions, in Rebecca Haidt on the importance of the eighteenth-century novel, in Elisa Marti-Lopez on the significance of nineteenth-century popular fiction, and in provocative takes on literary history (Anthony J. Close on the Quixote, for example).

There are some problems with the selective slant of the essays as a whole: thirty-one pages out of around three hundred is not enough to do justice to the entire period up to the 1820s; in the twentieth century, discussion of the years after 1940, and especially post-1960, occupies disproportionate space; and some important aspects of the period 1800-67 are neglected, notably the more experimental fiction and (but for an insightful intervention by Randolph Pope on the subject of Larra) the historical novel. In places, there is also some unwillingness to engage with more recent perspectives on Spanish history.

Such matters aside, the Companion will serve its broad readership well as a stimulating introduction to the Spanish novel.

ANDREW GINGER

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH