The Invention of the Sequel: Expanding Prose Fiction in Early Modern Spain
2013; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1478-3398
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Iberian Studies
ResumoWilliam H. Hinrichs, The Invention of the Sequel: Expanding Prose Fiction in Early Modern Spain. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis. 2011. 244 pp. ISBN 978 1 85566 232 2.In his analysis - his critical narrative - of early modern Spanish texts, William H. Hinrichs locates the birth of the sequel in Fernando de Rojas's Celestina (1499, 1502). The metaphorical association of Celestina's task of 'restoring' virginity with the idea of the continuation, which provides new beginnings and new endings to pre-existing stories, is sound and ingenious. Fittingly, Celestina dramatizes the act and the art of deferring denouements. Hinrich proceeds to an examination of Nicolas Nunez's sequel to (or 'expansion' (4, n.13) of) Diego de San Pedro's Carcel de amor (1492), with which it was published. In a sense, Hinrichs redeems Nunez, not by overpraising the continuator but by holding his work in higher regard than preceding scholars, notably Keith Whinnom, have done. Here, as throughout the study, Hinrichs takes into account the corpus of criticism as he surveys, situates, and appraises the works under scrutiny, in an admirable demonstration of what he calls 'the death of the ending', which simultaneously constitutes 'the birth of the sequel'. From the early sixteenth century, continuations matched original texts as bestsellers, and the acknowledged key player in this cottage industry, as it were, was the intense, prolific, and gifted Feliciano de Silva, who penned a sequel to Celestina and five sequels to the archetypal chivalric romance Amadis de Gaula. Hinrichs notes that Silva's successors, with the exception of Gaspar Gomez de Toledo (Tercera Celestina, 1536), generally 'wrote without passion for their subject or compassion for their readers' (47). He credits Silva with acknowledging and incorporating the outside world, and thus history and current events, into the fictional enterprise.Chapter 3, on the Segundo Lazarillo (1555), becomes the centre and, arguably, the centrepiece of Hinrichs's study, given that it resurrects - pun intended - the much-maligned (by rival authors and later by Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, among others) or more often ignored the second part of Lazarillo de Tormes. Hinrichs makes a somewhat surprising but valid case for the significance of the sequel to Lazarillo by maintaining that the anonymous continuation serves to establish the norms and the format of the picaresque genre. He emphasizes the metafictional base of the picaresque and the second author's extension of narrative space and conventions. The section titled 'Vuelta: From Man Overboard to Fish Out of Water' (119-24) is a tour de force and a defence of the structure and the technique of the 1555 version, which combines metamorphosis and poetics in a staging of rebirth. …
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