Cultural Authority In Golden Age Spain

"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.

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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.

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.”

A book about life in Spain from the succession of Philip II (1556) to the death of Philip IV (1665). The author relies primarily upon careful use of literary works and travel accounts written during this 'golden age'. In addition to delightful descriptions and anecdotes, he has woven into his text important political and economic developments. He provides a general view of Spain, stressing the importance of the Catholic faith and the emphasis upon personal honour, before surveying life and society in urban and rural areas. He then examines in some detail life in the Church, university, military and home; public entertainment; and the picaresque life.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Studies that connect the Spanish 17th and 20th centuries usually do so through a conservative lens, assuming that the blunt imperialism of the early modern age, endlessly glorified by Franco's dictatorship, was a constant in the Spanish imaginary. This book, by contrast, recuperates the thriving, humanistic vision of the Golden Age celebrated by Spanish progressive thinkers, writers, and artists in the decades prior to 1939 and the Francoist Regime. The hybrid, modern stance of the country in the 1920s and early 1930s would uniquely incorporate the literary and political legacies of the Spanish Renaissance into the ambitious design of a forward, democratic future. In exploring the complex understanding of the multifaceted event that is modernity, the life story and literary opus of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) acquires a new significance, given the weight of the author in the poetic and political endeavors of those Spanish left-wing reformists who believed they could shape a new Spanish society. By recovering their progressive dream, buried for almost a century, of incipient and full Spanish modernities, Ana María G. Laguna establishes a more balanced understanding of both the modern and early modern periods and casts doubt on the idea of a persistent conservatism in Golden Age literature and studies. This book ultimately serves as a vigorous defense of the canonical as well as the neglected critical traditions that promoted Cervantes's humanism in the 20th century.

Love poetry in the Spanish Golden Age redefines the lyric poetry that is located at the centre of Imperial Spanish culture's own self-image and self-definition. This work engages with a broader evaluation of early modern poetics that foregrounds the processes rather than the products of thinking. The locus of the study is the Imperial 'home' space, where love poetry meets early modern empire at the inception of a very conflicted national consciousness, and where the vernacular language, Castilian, emerges in the encounter as a strategic site of national and imperial identity. The political is, therefore, a pervasive presence, teased out where relevant in recognition of the poet's sensitivity to the ideologies within which writing comes into being. But the primary commitment of the book is to lyric poetry, and to poets, individually and intheir dynamic interconnectedness. Moving beyond a re-evaluation of critical responses to four major poets of the period (Garcilaso de la Vega, Herrera, Góngora and Quevedo), this study disengages respectfully with the substantialbody of biographical research that continues to impact upon our understanding of the genre, and renegotiates the Foucauldian concept of the 'epistemic break', often associated with the anti-mimetic impulses of the Baroque. This more flexible model accommodates the multiperspectivism that interrogated Imperial ideology even in the earliest sixteenth-century poetry, and allows for the exploration of new horizons in interpretation. Isabel Torres isProfessor of Spanish Golden Age Literature and Head of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Queen's University, Belfast.