Professor Jefferson Rea Spell, for forty-seven years a member of the Department of Spanish at the University of Texas, who died in 1967, was one of the pioneers in the United States in the study of Latin American and especially Mexican literature. His books on The Life and Works of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (Philadelphia, 1931), Rousseau in the Spanish World (Austin, 1938), Contemporary Spanish American Fiction (Chapel Hill, 1944), and his editions of comedies of Eusebio Vela (in collaboration with Francisco Monterde) and of the several novels of Lizardi, are standard works.
The present book gathers together sixteen articles from his pen, previously published in learned journals, and three chapters from the first of the above-mentioned books. They date variously from 1923 to 1963, and give us a picture of a life devoted to the scholarly study of Mexican literature and thought. They have been grouped in six parts: i. Materials for the study of Mexican literature (a report on the University of Texas acquisition of the Genaro García collection); ii. The Mexican theater (in the eighteenth century and in 1805-1806); iii. The channels of diffusion of Rousseau (in Spain and in Mexico); iv. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (the largest group, including papers dating from 1930 to 1963); v. The costumbrista movement in Mexico; and vi. Mexican literary periodicals (in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, plus a study of those published in Mexico by the Cuban poet José María Heredia). All these papers are equally well grounded in exhaustive bibliographical research, with indication of the places where the materials used are to be found, and all are distinguished by clear thinking, clear exposition, and convincing argumentation.
The papers of greatest interest to readers of HAHR are probably those on the penetration of Rousseau in Spain and Spanish America, on the intellectual background of Fernández de Lizardi, on the historical and social background of his El Periquillo sarniento, and on Lizardi’s work as a pamphleteer (pp. 71-96, 149-196, and 247-263).
Very few pages of the articles collected have dated since their first publication—perhaps only those dealing with the supposed absence of novels in colonial Spanish America, printed before Irving Leonard’s and José Torre Revello’s studies on this subject. This speaks very highly for the thoroughness of Dr. Spell’s research methodology.
The book includes a foreword by Mrs. Lota M. Spell, a scholar in her own right, sketching the career of her late husband. She closes it stating that: “he went far toward bridging the century-old gap between Anglo and Hispanic America, by bringing into closer contact, in thought, in word, and in deed, the thinking people of two continents.” The truth of these words is the best epitaph to the memory of a learned and good man.
