Exemplary Ambivalence in Late Nineteenth-Century Spanish America Narrating Creole Subjectivity

In this dense study, Austin (Virginia Tech) widens and deepens understanding of the dynamics of reading in late-19th-century Spanish American prose literature. Essentially, she studies aspects of the reading practices and their corresponding cultural matrices of a period that--following the establishment of independent republics in most of the continent--saw the full emergence of the Creole writing subject. The hybridity of this subject is a constant concern for the author, who offers chapters on major texts along with little-known works by writers including Eugenio Cambaceres, Domingo Sarmiento, Jose Asuncion Silva, Jose Marti, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Juana Manuela Gorriti. Positing that allegory and example are major tropes through which the reader's agency is enacted, Austin convincingly argues for the need to focus on the pertinence of exemplarity. For Austin, the example, from Count Don Manuel on, has called for mimetic modeling not always recognized in Hispanic literatures. She argues for "the necessity of reading exemplarity as an inherently inconclusive and contradictory means of guidance" in texts ranging from biography to novels to, surprisingly, Gorriti's 1890 cookbook Cocina eclectic (1890), an apparently exotic text that is fully appropriate as a balance to what Austin calls the "national-decadent-gendered-interventionist novels" she analyzes earlier. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. CHOICE