Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age

by Anthony J. Cascardi

Overview

Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was in the throes of modernization arising from trade with the New World and the rise of an urban society. During this period, Spanish culture came to be dominated by the tension between an old regime of traditional values—honor, lineage, purity of blood—and these modernizing influences.

Anthony J. Cascardi examines the literature of the Golden Age as the point at which tensions between the old and the new converged and proposes that this historical drama provided the context for subject-formation in early modern Spain. He examines how Spanish writers envisioned history and studies how these visions revealed or concealed contradictions between social values of their time, particularly between the value systems of caste and class.

Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age draws on recent theoretical paradigms in contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social theory, and literary history to place Spain's major literary figures in challenging new contexts. By accounting for both modernizing desires and resistances to modernization, Cascardi provides readers interested in theories of ideology and history with a new way of looking at the literature of the Spanish Golden Age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271025698
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	09/15/1997
Series:	Studies in Romance Literatures
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.09(d)

About the Author

Anthony J. Cascardi is Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, and the editor of the Press's Literature and Philosophy series. He is the author of The Subject of Modernity, among numerous other works.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Introduction: Historicizing the Golden Age	1
1	The Spanish Comedia and the Resistance to Historical Change	17
2	Transformations of the Cid	47
3	Allegories of Power in Calderon	75
4	The Subject of Control in Counter-Reformation Spain	105
5	Gracian and the Authority of Taste	133
6	Desire and Authority in the Spanish Golden Age: Oedipus and Don Juan	161
7	The Archaeology of Desire in Don Quijote	183
8	Secularization and Literary Self-Assertion in Don Quijote	209
9	Instinct and Object: Subjectivity and Speech-Act in Garcilaso de la Vega	247
10	Reason and Romance	287
	Index	323

Editorial Reviews

“This book presents an important argument about the ideological force of literature in the Golden Age.”

—Stephen Rupp, Modern Philology

From the Publisher

Argues that the recent academic urge to historicize Spanish literature and art between the end of the 15th century and the end of the 17th by substituting Early Modern Spain for The Golden Age is all well and good, but that too many scholars believe they have finished the project once they have erected the temporal boundaries. Suggests that the task involves investigating how literature is shaped by tensions focused at the level of social structure, and how literature is itself a social force offering solutions for social conflicts that are otherwise unresolvable. Most of the chapter are revised from previous publications. No subject index. Paper edition (unseen) $19.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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