"Over the past several years, a series of extraordinary cutting edge developments have taken place in Golden Age Spanish studies. Important new issues have been addressed--and conceived--in innovative ways: questions of gender and sexuality; concepts of self and other; political and social contexts of literary production and reception. While these investigations have already begun to have a significant impact on our current reconceptualization of culture in general and Spanish culture in particular, they have until now been somewhat overly dispersed, even fragmented--in large part because of their very nature as rethinkings, as experimental. The present volume constitutes a collective examination of these kinds of key cultural issues within the historically specific context of Golden Age Spain, configured around the central question of authority."--Marina S. Brownlee, from the Preface. In a wide-ranging series of essays, the contributors to this volume bring recent critical and theoretical perspectives to bear on our understanding of culture in Golden Age Spain, focusing on the related notions of authority, authorship, selfhood, and tradition in Spanish culture. This book will appeal to Hispanists and comparatists interested in contemporary perspectives on the literature and culture of medieval and Renaissance Spain as well as to medievalists and Renaissance specialists interested in Spanish literature. Contributors: La Schwartz Lerner, Jos Regueiro, Edward H. Friedman, Mary Malcolm Gaylord, Marina S. Brownlee, Paul Julian Smith, Harry Sieber, Robert ter Horst, Ruth El Saffar, Anthony J. Cascardi, Diana de Armas Wilson, Walter Cohen, Joan Ramn Resina, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.

The Spanish Golden Age, a cultural narrative that has developed and over four centuries, remains a key element of how Spaniards articulate cultural identities, both within Spain and to the outside world. The Currency of Cultural Patrimony examines the development of this narrative by artists, intellectuals, historians, academics, and institutions. By defining the Spanish Golden Age as a diachronic problem, it examines several of Spain’s most canonical golden-age literary narratives (including Don Quixote, Fuenteovejuna, and Las mocedades del Cid) as texts whose institutionalization, mediation, and commercialization over the course of four hundred years inform their meaning both for contemporary Spaniards and for the field of Hispanic Studies around the world. Spain’s persistent deployment of this cultural patrimony as the canonical epicentre of a national literary tradition has stimulated diverse and often contradictory interpretations, the cumulative effect of which informs their reception by each new generation of Spaniards. This book’s analysis of how this patrimony is interpreted according to both tradition and current circumstances illuminates new angles from which scholars can approach some of Hispanism’s most persistent and vexing questions, including the growing divide between popular and academic understandings of the Spanish nation’s “classics.”

This study offers a reading of Don Quixote, with comparative material from Golden Age history and Cervantes life, to argue that his greatest work was not just the hilariously comic entertainment that most of his contemporaries took it to be. Rather, it belongs to a subversive tradition of writing that grew up in sixteenth-century Spain and which constantly questioned the aims and standards of the imperial nation state that Counter-reformation Spain had become from the point of view of Renaissance humanism. Prime consideration needs to be given to the system of Spanish censorship at the time, run largely by the Inquisition albeit officially an institution of the crown, and its effect on the cultural life of the country. In response, writers of poetry and prose fiction -- strenuously attacked on moral grounds by sections of the clergy and the laity -- became adept at camouflaging heterodox ideas through rhetoric and imaginative invention. Ironically, Cervantes success in avoiding the attention of the censor by concealing his criticisms beneath irony and humour was so effective that even some twentieth-century scholars have maintained Don Quixote is a brilliantly funny book but no more. Bob Britton draws on recent critical and historical scholarship -- including ideas on cultural authority and studies on the way Cervantes addresses history, truth, writing, law and gender in Don Quixote -- and engages with the intellectual and moral issues that this much-loved writer engaged with. The summation and appraisal of these elements within the context of Golden Age censorship and the literary politics of the time make it essential reading for all those who are interested in or study the Spanish language and its literature.

This volume address the role of literature in the formation of cultural notions of 'state,' 'nation,' 'subject,' and 'citizen' in Spain from the Renaissance to the Romantic period. It brings together literary scholars and historians of the Golden Age and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a dialog framed by the rise and dissolution of the Absolutist state. Individual essays attempt to understand relationships between subjectivity and the state in Spain from the earliest articulations of the subject to the consolidation of an array of bourgeois subjectivities. The major argument running throughout the volume is that literary discourse, from the time it emerges in the sixteenth century to the time it coheres within a wholly modern concept of the aesthetic, actively develops forms of subjectivity in relation to institutions of class power. The intention of the volume is to clarify central problems regarding the emergence and function of literature across distinct modes of production, state formations, and hegemonic cultures. This book keeps open a debate on the long process through which literature and the aesthetic come to be constituted as a complex arena in which-sometimes directly, more often indirectly-the struggle for state power unfolds.

Plot Twists and Critical Turns: Queer Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Theater offers readings of a variety of works of seventeenth-century Spanish theater from perspectives grounded in queer studies, and demonstrates that these plays, even given the limitations imposed by censorship, public taste, and their own conventional precepts, are shot through with gaps that allow one to perceive at least the outlines of an absent queer object if not overt examples of manifest challenges to gender conformity.

The first in-depth analysis of some of the most important epic poems of the Spanish Golden Age, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain breathes new life into five of these long- neglected texts. Elizabeth Davis demonstrates that the epic must not be overlooked, for doing so creates a significant gap in one's ability to appraise not only the cultural practice of the imperial age, but also the purest expression of its ideology. Davis's study focuses on heroic poetry written from 1569 to 1611, including Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana, undeniably the most significant epic poem of its time. Also included are Diego de Hojeda's La Christiada, Juan Rufo's La Austriada, . Lope de Vega's Jerusalén Conquistada, and Cristóbal de Virués's Historia del Monserrate. Examining these epics as the major site for the construction of cultural identities and Renaissance nationalist myths, Davis analyzes the means by which the epic constructs a Spanish sense of self. Because this sense of identity is not easily susceptible to direct representation, it is often derived in opposition to an "other," which serves to reaffirm Spanish cultural superiority. The Spanish Christian caballeros are almost always pitted against Amerindians, Muslims, Jews, or other adversaries portrayed as backward or heathen for their cultural and ethnic differences. The pro-Castilian elite of sixteenth-century Spain faced the daunting task of constructing unity at home in the process of expansion and conquest abroad, yet ethnic and regional differences in the Iberian Peninsula made the creation of an imperial identity particularly difficult. The epic, as Davis shows, strains to convey the overriding image of a Spain that appears more unified than the Spanish empire ever truly was. An important reexamination of the Golden Age canon, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain brings a new twist to the study of canon formation. While Davis does not ignore more traditional approaches to the literary text, she does apply recent theories, such as deconstruction and feminist criticism, to these poems, resulting in an innovative examination of the material. Confronting such issues as canonicity, gender, the relationship between literature and Golden Age culture, and that between art and power, this publication offers scholars a new perspective for assessing Golden Age and Transatlantic studies

Inspired by Walter Benjamin's notion of constellation, this book draws on theories of Latin American modernity to investigate the Spanish literary Baroque and its repetitions as a historical-cultural predicament in Latin American colonial and modern texts. Inca Garcilaso, Borges, Carpentier, Rulfo, Darío and a range of Latin American "Post-Symbolist" poets (Agustini, Pizarnik, Sosa, Lienlaf and Huinao) are juxtaposed with the Lazarillo, the Quijote, Fuenteovejuna and Góngora's Soledades to produce original readings on topics of violence, rape, frustrated pilgrimage, and the truncated ambitions of colonized peoples and confessional minorities. In turn, Benjamin is juxtaposed with Mallarmé to recast the aesthetic dynamics of modernity in political terms, in order to understand the Baroque within a more broadly historicized concept of the avant-garde. Generous in scope, this book addresses the community of Spanish and Latin American criticism as well as emerging and pressing theoretical concerns within the field of comparative literature.

The beginning of the seventeenth century in Spain marks a rapid rise in the commercial market for cultural production. This book examines the evolution of this commercial market as reflected in the maturation of two genres: the public theater and the novel. Through a comparative analysis of the play-wright Lope de Vega and the novelists Mateo Aleman and Miguel de Cervantes, the author explores the new poetic principles, both implicitly and explicitly, that accompany the rise of this commercialized literature. The book argues that the logic of classical economic theory becomes internalized within the poetic structure of these two genres. Within this logic, the idea of taste comes to play a new and unprecedented role as the arbiter of literary value. Exposed increasingly to the pressures of popular taste, these writers are forced to rework or abandon many of the traditional poetic ideas of the Renaissance in a process that tends to undermine the writer's control over his own work. Donald Gilbert-Santamaria teaches in the Division of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The essays in this collection provide new material to enable the continuing recuperation of the complex social ambiance that both created and was reflected in the literature of Spain's Golden Age.