Dianna C. Niebylski

A Companion to Latin American Women Writers ed. by Brígida M. Pastor and Lloyd Hughes Davies (review)

undergraduate or graduate literature courses—although he does take that position, and argues it compellingly (242–61). Rather, Lifshey states, “[t]he aim of The Magellan Fallacy is not to reveal that certain traditions and texts exist. It is to argue that such literature is imperative to altering our basic understandings of how marginalized arts refract modern power and recast it altogether” (4). Although Lifshey claims that it is not his primary aim, it would be a mistake to underestimate the contribution this book makes to Spanish studies in opening our eyes to a whole world of textual production in Spanish that has been virtually—in some cases entirely—ignored by Hispanists until now. This contribution, which required painstaking archival work under dismal conditions, is scarcely short of heroic. But also, and more importantly, Lifshey’s perceptive and deft textual analyses demonstrate how our view of Spanishness is profoundly altered if we take Equatorial Guinea or the Philippines as points of departure for a consideration of Iberian and Latin American cultural production. For both of these reasons, The Magellan Fallacy stands as a major contribution to Spanish studies.