Foregrounded Description in Prose Fiction

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

Using a conjunction of theoretical, critical, and comparative
approaches, Lopes, in this valuable contribution, proposes a framework
for analyzing the function of description in five examples of 19th- and
20th-century prose fiction. To test his model across a chronological and
cultural spectrum, he deals with, in five more or less uniform chapters,
the following texts: Zola’s Une page d’amour (France), Claude
Simon’s Histoire (France), Pérez Galdуs’s La de Bringas (Spain),
Cornélio Penna’s A Menina Morte (Brazil), and Carlos de Oliveira’s
Finisterra (Portugal). The chapters, which effect an analysis of this
foregrounding of descriptive passages (the role of parody, mise en
abyme, modes of representation, and so forth), are enclosed by a brief
theoretical introduction and conclusion, and are enhanced by 15 pages of
useful notes and a 12-page bibliography. This is a dense, challenging
study that demands specialist knowledge and attentive readers.