Current Issue Article Abstracts
December 2018 Vol. 71.2
SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK II
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Articles
Vuelve los ojos a la Tierra Santa: estrategias visuales y lectoras en torno a las ediciones de El devoto peregrino de fray Antonio del Castillo (1654–1666)
Fernando Bouza, pp. 113 - 129The happy finding of the original documentation related to the publication of various editions of The Devout Pilgrim(1654-1666) allows for the reconstruction of the material process of the first editions of this important book of travels to the Holy Land. The general context of these editions has to do with the urgent need to promote both pilgrimages to the holy sites as well as alms to support them, considering that other religious orders were attracting their faithful to North Africa with their tales of martyrs and captives. The printed books, along with print engravings, paintings, and small-scale models of the holy sites, were used for the multi-continental diffusion of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which left its mark both in the Palestinian workshops where the designs were made and in the American lands where many models, books, and printed images were sent.
Actualidad del mercado del libro: el caso argentino
José Luis de Diego, pp. 131 - 150Over the last thirty years, a series of rapid changes have taken place and, as a result, the book market has experienced a reconfiguration process. The present study focuses on the case of the Argentinian market; however, we are not trying to imply it is an isolated and encapsulated market that possesses unique features but rather trying to understand how and under which conflicting terms global issues were resolved within a specific context. To that end, we analyze the following topics: an ever-growing market concentration revolving around a few companies which, combined, account for a transnational oligopoly known for its fluidity when it comes to exchanges with foreign countries and for the imposition of high profitability criteria; the development of new technologies and its impact and visible effects in book production; the emergence of small and middle-sized publishing houses (independent, alternative, or marginal according to their marketplace positioning) that have managed to find more or less profitable niches in terms of genres, themes, and authors that don not attract the interest of the big corporations; the consolidation of new types of publishers that do not come from high culture backgrounds; the new market openings that derive from superstores and online sales; the new methods for book trading through "colonization" of reference areas; and, in correlation, the explosion of new genres and formats.
El manuscrito moderno y la "idea Bécquer"
Juan F. Egea, pp. 151 - 162This article offers a historical ontology of the modern manuscript taking Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's Libro de los gorriones as its object of study. It analyzes the different representational and institutional processes by which a particular literary autograph becomes a cultural commodity as a text as much as an object. Drawing from Walter Benjamin's work, and making use in particular of his ideas about aura and trace, this article blends material studies and textual criticism to follow Bécquer's manuscript through markets, mythic and bibliographic accounts, national libraries and the academia. In the final analysis, this essay examines the relation between the materiality of texts and the formation of a national canon, and, more specifically, between the genealogy of the paradigmatic romantic manuscript and the coming into being of the very idea of its author.
Towards a Modern Synergy: Cultural Massification and the Compartmentalization of Books and Publics in Argentina and Brazil (1920–1960)
Guido Herzovich, pp. 163 - 177Drawing on and articulating insights from the history of the book and the sociology of culture, this article analyzes changes to the distribution models used by a number of publishers in Argentina and Brazil during the first half of the twentieth century, in order to provide a grounded theorization of literary massification. Around 1920, Claridad, Babel, and Monteiro Lobato sought to integrate two circuits—newsstands and bookstores—whose divide had a structuring function in the literary sphere. Rendering these spaces complementary, I argue, entailed a transformation from material to discursive modes of compartmentalizing books and publics. The development of what I call a discursive infrastructure, made chiefly of advertising and reviews, is a key element that made possible one of massification's defining features: the coexistence of conflicting but mutually visible modes of appropriation.
Hacia una teoría de la lectura en la época colonial
Jorge Téllez, pp. 179 - 196This article examines the relationship between the history of reading and current theories of reading in the context of Colonial Latin America. Specifically, I study scenes of public and private reading in colonial texts by Hernán Cortés, Diego Mexía, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to argue that scenes of reading and reading accounts create a space of struggle between the public place that people occupied in society and their private will to surpass it. Departing from a set of questions that focus on the conditions of reading depicted in such texts, I propose that the public relevance of private reading directs our attention to a larger corpus of testimonies in which reading is not a uniform or replicable act, but a contingent and individual one. Moreover, it reflects on the relationship between violence and reading as one of the critical elements of the constitution of the colonial subject.
REVIEWS:
Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico, by Amber Bryan (review) Reviewed by Jannette Amaral-Rodríguez
Comics and Memory in Latin America ed. Jorge Catalá Carrasco, Paulo Drinot, and James Scorer (review) Reviewed by Phillip Penix-Tadsen
La musa refractada: literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco by Enrique García Santo-Tomás (review) Reviewed by Cory A. Reed
Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries by Sarah Kay (review) Reviewed by Courtney Joseph Wells
Ilustrar e imprimir: una historia de la cultura gráfica de Buenos Aires (1830–1930) by Coordinadora Sandra Szir (review) Reviewed by Agustina Pérez