434 Reviews AR 71 (2003) a la expresién de la sensibilidad personal, aherrojada y hasta emparedada por las formulaciones de los loci communes. Bl trabajo de Ferri Coll pre- senta el enfrentamiento teérico entre la inflexibilidad del t6pico y la modu- lacién a que tratan de someterlo las varias sensibilidades poéticas, sin éxito casi siempre (aunque no todos los nocturnos eran escritores deleznables, asimilables a lo que hoy lamamos “eruditos locales”). Esta monografia aporta novedades en el conocimiento fundamentado del papel de las elites en la nueva realidad ciudadana, de la funcién del escritor en tiempos en que se estd generando la idea de “capital” —y no mero lugar de residencia de la Corte—, del proceso de municipalizacion de la cultura y, en fin, de la institucionalizacién del humanismo de base plat6nica (vinculado éste a la primitiva idea de academia). ¥ todavia hay que afiadir otro mérito mas, y no desdefiable: el libro destaca por la trabazén de su entramado conceptual y por la excelencia de su prosa. Avogt L. Prieto De Pauta Universidad de Alicante Agencias criollas: La ambigiiedad “colonial” en las letras hispano- americanas. Ed. José Antonio Mazzotti. Pittsburgh: Instituto Interna- cional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000. 265 pages. This book is a collection of essays based on papers presented at a conference of the same title at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. The goal of the conference was to explore the issue of criollismo before the Bourbon reforms in the context of new approaches and conceptualizations that have emerged in the field of Latin American colonial studies. The emphasis on “agency” in the title of the volume is a conscious opposition to the notion of subject. This post- structuralist emphasis sees criollismo not as a coherently articulated, spe- cific kind of subjectivity but rather as a murky field of activity that consti- tutes the conditions for its very existence. One of the common threads that appears repeatedly in the volume is an understanding of criollismo as a social space through which an identity is enacted. Bernard Lavallé argues that although eriollismo is normally seen as emerging in the seventeenth and developing fully in the latter part of the eighteenth century, it really began in the first decades of Spanish presence in America when the interests of the settlers came into conflict with the crown, and the doctrine of “acato pero no cumplo” represents both the symptom and the postponement of a crisis that only worsens throughout the colonial period. In her article on the epic Cortés valeroso (1594), Mary MalcolmReviews 435 Gaylord identifies a creole agency in the figure of the castaway and later interpreter for Cortés, Jerénimo de Aguilar. Solange Alberro also locates the roots of Mexican criollismo at the beginning of the colonial period in an inevitable—and often unconscious—process of acculturation based on ad- aptation to the local environment and intimate contact with indigenous culture. And Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel argues that Hernén Cortés's “Se- gunda carta” initiates a discourse characteristic of a colonial Latin American subjectivity—which would later become known as criollo—that is always negotiating between its objects of desire and the circuits of local and metropolitan power. The new political, economic, and social spaces that Spaniards, Creoles, mestizos, and even indigenous Americans create in the colonial period are accompanied by discourses that reflect the tensions, ambivalences, and ambiguities inherent in those spaces. Pedro Lasarte demonstrates that in the poetry of Mateo Rosas de Oquendo and Juan del Valle y Caviedes, the symbolic difference between criolio and Spaniard was not always clear cut. José A. Rodrfguez-Garrido, on the other hand, examines a political and discursive struggle between the viceroy and criollo intellectuals that mani- fests itself in the relationship between poetry and power in eighteenth- ntury Lima. Mabel Morafia argues that Carlos de Sigtienza y Gongora’s “Alboroto y motin de los indios de México” demonstrates a kind of fair- weather criollismo that quickly takes sides with Spain in times of social unrest. Similarly, Kathleen Ross identifies in the Tratado del descubrimiento de las Indias (1589) by Suarez de Peralta an ambivalence that exhibits both metropolitan and specifically American features. José Antonio Mazzotti un- covers an emerging criolUo discourse in the epics Nuevo Mundo by Terrazas and Peregrino indiano by Saavedra Guzman. These epics articulate a posi- tion that is superficially loyal to the crown but which implicitly desires the relative autonomy and political recognition of American criollos. Paul Firbas analyzes the use of the term and concept “antarctic” as a literary convention that resolves poetically the violence of the conquest and colonial tensions, and allows crioilos to situate themselves with respect to European tradi- tions. Rolena Adomo examines the innovation in colonial historiography introduced by indigenous and mestizo writers. Her article deals specifically with the Guaman Poma/Blas Valera controversy sparked by the Naples manuscripts, but it addresses the larger question of an emerging tran taral social and discursive space. Finally, in his study of the beatification process of Santa Rosa de Lima, Teodoro Hampe Martinez detects an emerg- ing, often contradictory creole nationalism in seventeenth-century Peru. As perhaps a reflection of the current state of this field of inquiry, several of the articles in this volume do not fully elaborate the implications of their analyses for the notion of early criollismo. One of the unanswered questions436 Reviews HR 71 (2003) that arises in several of these studies is the relationship between a reworked criollismo and cultural mestizaje, heterogeneity, and similar categories that have been applied to the same phenomena. This is less a shortcoming than a provocation for further critical work in an engaging and evolving field of study. The articles in this book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in colonial Latin American criollismo. GaLEN BROKAW State University of New York at Buffalo Tres poetas, tres amigos: Estudios sobre Vicente Aleixandre, Fede- rico Garcia Lorea y Démaso Alonso. Ed. Francisco Javier Diez de Revenga y Mariano de Paco. Murcia: Caja Murcia, Obra Cultural, 1999. 348 paginas. Si los finales de siglos brindan momentos de pausas reflexivas y procesos evaluativos, el afio de 1998 le ofrece a la historiografia de la poesia espafiola una fuente incesante de eventos desde los cuales repensar poetas y produc- ciones de la llamada generaci6n del 27. El motivo: los centenarios conjuntos de Vicente Aleixandre, Federico Garcia Lorea y Démaso Alonso. En la cuidadosa edicién preparada por Francisco Diez de Revenga y Mariano de Paco de Jas ponencias del Curso Internacional celebrado en Murcia en octubre de 1998, los tres aparecen enlazados por la amistad y por sus colaboraciones en revistas literarias de esa ciudad. La brevedad a la que limitan las resefias impide dedicarse de lleno a cada articulo, por ello resumo contenidos. Un total de 17 ensayos se dividen casi equitativamente entre los tres poetas para estudiar eventos personales 0 las producciones literarias de cada uno. La excepcién proviene de Juan Cano Ballesta, quien en el ensayo inagural “Tres voces (airadas) de una genera- cién: Federico Garcfa Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre y Démaso Alonso” propone considerar Ia diversidad de registros en las denuncias poéticas del trio. Los siguientes cinco se dedican a Vicente Aleixandre desde premisas ya cono- cidas como en “Aleixandre y la experiencia de la vanguardia” de José Luis Bernal Salgado, hasta primicias documentales en el caso de Alejandro Duque Amsco y “Vicente Aleixandre: El imposible exilio,” quien aporta pruebas del fallido intento del poeta por salir de Espafia en 1938. Sin embargo, es el género literario del retrato aleixandriano el que mayor atencién critica recibe. En su vertiente poética con “‘Este que aqui mirdis’: Los retratos Ifricos de Vicente Aleixandre” de Francisco J. Diaz de Castro. En la prosa, la lucidez de José Marfa Pozuelo Yvancos se evidencia en “Retrato, historia yCopyright © 2003 EBSCO Publishing