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Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context. Edited by Nicholas Spadaccmi and Luis MartIn-Estudillo. Hispanic Issues 31. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2005. xxxvi + 322 pp.
This collection of essays seeks to expand the possibilities of the term "Baroque" as a category, a concept, and a historical period. The volume brings together a host of useful approaches to the cultural manifestations of the Baroque period that are not limited to the literary alone. As the editors note in their introduction, the field of Early Modern Hispanic Studies seems to have overcome the purely negative perception of the Baroque as the decadent art of a dying empire. Rather, the explosion of recent studies, especially those related to Colonial Latin America, have led to a reconsideration of the ways in which the Baroque esthetic could be appropriated by all sorts of social agents. In this sense, many of the essays in the volume build on, revise, or respond to José Antonio Maravall's influential theory of the Baroque as a conservative, top-down and mass-oriented social and historical structure, as delineated in his 1975 study La cultura del barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica.
The editors' introduction to the volume provides a helpful overview of recent developments in Baroque studies and traces the vicissitudes of the appellation. The remainder of the collection is divided into five sections that discuss specific problems related to the Baroque. Part I, "The Baroque and Its Dark Sides," deals with melancholy, desengaño and the monstrous aspects of the administration of the Habsburg Empire. The two essays in the section discuss the psychological strategies of domination utilized by the Habsburg Empire-the Baroque esthetic being one of them-as well as the deconstructive, delirious nature of the Baroque. Part II, "Baroque Anxieties and Strategies of Survival," illuminates many of the philosophical cruxes common to the Baroque such as the...