A Post-Modern Approach to the Spanish Renaissance: Paul Julian Smith on the Literature and Literary Theory of the Golden Age

Abstract

In his Introduction, Dr Smith presents this book as ‘the first study of writing in the Spanish Renaissance or Golden Age to draw extensively on what has become known as “post-structuralism”‘.1 He does acknowledge some recent work in English, but his is the first attempt to approach, in a deconstructive mode, not a single piece of literature or an author, but a whole period's representative texts in three principal genres (lyric poetry, picaresque narrative, drama) as well as poetics. It merits attention, therefore, by virtue of being a trail-blazer. This is not conventional literary history, though the poets (Garcilaso, Herrera, Gongora) are treated sequentially, and the same may be said of the genres presented in the other chapters. Texts are not made part of a historical narrative or expressions of a mentalite. But neither is it totally detached from history, in the sense that the relation between the reader and the text is constrained by conventions and structures of authority that it is the critic's b...