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New Historicism and the Comedia: Poetics, Politics and Praxis. Ed. Jose A. Madrigal. Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1997. 236 pages.
Historicized by their own moments of reception and production, the eleven authors of essays contained in this seminal volume on the comedia and the legacies of New Historicism seek to provide a critique of the methodology, at the same time that they test its applicability to a variety of Golden Age pre-texts and texts diachronically reassessed, and, in the case of Denise DiPuccio's incisive contribution on contemporary Spanish and Mexican playwrights (e.g., Manuel Martinez Medeiro, Carlos Muniz, Ana Diosdado, Miguel Sabido, Elena Garro), intertextually refashioned in light of the Quincentennial. Whether considered discretely or holistically, these essays illustrate, from the standpoint of both theory and praxis, a dynamic rendered by Louis Montrose as "the historicity of texts" and the "textuality of history" ("Professing the Renaissance," The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser, London: Routledge, 1989. 20). Taken in their totality the essays, in their greater or lesser theoretical approach to the phenomenon of new historicism and its aftermath, provide an enlightened inquiry into the relationship between cultural forms, the structures of state, institutional authority and their theatrical representations. They elude in the main a reductively polarized opposition between "containment" and "subversion," which Montrose cites as a perennial pitfall of a contextual understanding of the historical and aesthetic canon and, by extension, of a...