Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain

Abstract

Esteemed professor, critic, and scholar Sharon Keefe Ugalde, who for many years has provided groundbreaking analyses of contemporary Spanish women poets, has recently published a significant book that is in many ways a compilation and overview of the context of her work since the death of Franco in 1975. This recent book, Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain, undertakes an in-depth study of the Ophelia theme in different genres and settings, responding to the question of why the importance of the theme for Spain and its relationship to both time and place. From the outset, Professor Ugalde states the need for such an analysis: “Despite the originality and abundance of literary, dramatic and artistic transformations of Ophelia, the Spanish is completely overlooked in recent analyses (2). For Ugalde then, the purpose of her book is to “remedy this critical oversight and to highlight for an international audience the range and quality of creative endeavours produced in Spain since the Transition” (2). According to Ugalde, chapter’s end, Dr. Leavitt offers a compelling discussion of the category of neorealism today. While sympathetic to the argument of Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe and others that neorealism and realism have had perhaps unwarranted critical precedence in studies of Italian cinema, Dr. Leavitt interrogates these terms that, for better or for worse, are held up as the bars by which many other national cinemas are measured. Neorealism: A Cultural History is a valuable resource for anyone working in European cultural history, Italian film studies and literary history, and film studies more broadly. Further, in its exploration into the persistence of neorealism as a cultural category that has captivated individuals across the globe, Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History unveils how neorealism has become a “fixed historical signifier” (175) even when it emerged in the 1940s as a complex cultural conversation with a distinct cultural legacy.