Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age

The corpus of literary works shaped by the Renaissance and the Baroque that appeared in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a transforming effect on writing throughout Europe and left a rich legacy that scholars continue to explore. For four decades after the Spanish Civil War the study of this literature flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, where many of the leading scholars in the field were based. Sadly, this particular ‘Golden Age’ was followed by a decline for many years in the numbers of academics and postgraduates teaching and researching in this field, but recently there have been signs of a significant revival, both in numbers and in publications. The present book seeks to showcase the latest research of established and younger colleagues from Great Britain and Ireland on the Spanish Golden Age. It falls into four sections, in each of which works by particular authors are examined in detail: prose (Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracián), poetry (The Count of Salinas, Luis de Góngora, Pedro Soto de Rojas), drama (Cervantes, Calderón, Lope de Vega), and colonial writing (Bernardo Balbuena, Hernando Domínguez Camargo, Alonso de Ercilla). There are essays also on more general themes (the motif of poetry as manna; rehearsals on the Golden Age stage; proposals put to viceroys on governing Spanish Naples). The contributors are all associated with universities in England, Scotland and Ireland, and their essays, taken together, offer a representative sample of current scholarship in these islands: the main areas in which research is being pursued, the kinds of problems being considered, and the various approaches being adopted to resolve them.