![]() ![]() More recently IAU Committees or Working Groups have given or certified the names of astronomical objects and features. At its inaugural meeting in 1922 in Rome, the IAU standardized the constellation names and abbreviations. With reservations, I would recommend the volume to those interested in Spanish Golden Age drama and/or in the specific theoretical issues raised by the play.īARBARA E.Celestial nomenclature has long been a controversial topic. ![]() I should also note that both the "Works Cited" and the "Index" cover all the essays - something of a rarity in essay collections and a welcome asset to busy scholars. Taken as a whole (and with some traditional exceptions), the essays honorably represent the ongoing effort to bring Hispanic studies abreast of the most current trends in literary and cultural theory. Nonetheless, a number of the contributions are very strong, among them Elias Rivers's seminal study (one of the recycles, but never mind in this case - the author's points bear repeating) of the play's inscription of writing and orality as that issue relates to the honor system itself. The volume's essays are of uneven quality at least a couple have been recycled from their authors' previous publications, and some merely glance at the play in question, situating their major focus instead on issues of more general concern to Golden Age drama. Several contributors (Fischer, Bergmann, Burke, Oriel, and Rivers) analyze the inscription of writing in the play. Hernandez Valcarcel and Lopez-Vazquez take up the issue of the play's authorship, the former voting for probable authorship by Lope the latter for Andres de Claramonte. In addition, Stoll examines issues related to the play's staging and to dramatic performance in general. Several authors (Burton, Casa, McKendrick, Sturm, Heiple, de Armas) examine the play as an exemplar, more or less, of that genre beloved of medieval and Renaissance writers, the de regimine principum.Īmong the other critical issues and approaches are semiotics (Cruz), feminism (Cruz, Mandrell, Bergmann), and Orientaliasm (Connor). For example, the volume's editor, de Armas, educes a number of parallels between Philip and the plays medieval monarch, Sancho IV, in the service of a convincing argument that such analogies amount to a veiled critique of Philip for his amorous libertinage and for his possible complicity in the murder of a critic of his amorous adventuring. ![]() A number of contributors focus on the play's most obvious political subtext: the turbulent reign of King Philip IV, during the first years of which La estrella premiered. In the majority are studies that examine La estrella in light of political theory and the contemporaneous political situation. The range of critical and theoretical approaches exemplified by the volume's essays is extensive, although most of the contributions could be classified broadly, and not very usefully, as poststructuralist. Yet it is precisely such controversies that prompted the 1992 symposium and that motivated one of the collections sections, on "Canonicity," as well as several essays dealing with the play's problematic authorship. La estrella would seem at first glance to be a rather odd choice for its own international symposium, since its canonical status within Spanish Golden Age drama is scarcely secure, as several of the contributors mention and as the volume's editor notes in his preface (7) even its authorship is disputed, with most scholars attributing it to Lope de Vega, but some (including two authors in this volume) dissenting. The play considered here, La estrella de Sevilla (16237), is the result of one such venture, a symposium that was held at Pennsylvania State University in 1992. ISBN: n.a.Īlthough symposia and conferences devoted to a single literary text are a staple in Anglo-American and comparative studies, the practice has until recently been under-explored and little-used in Hispanic studies. Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press, Associated University Presses, 1996.
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