Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"For more than a decade Cascardi has been looking at Spanish Golden Age literature (16th and 17th centuries) from a historicist perspective, and the volume under consideration here brings together ten studies, most of them previously seen in slightly different versions. Cascardi's goal is to 'historicize a category' (Golden Age) which is, he states, normally viewed in aesthetic terms. Although slightly exaggerated, the claim nonetheless points us toward a fresh— postmodern—view of the literature of 'early modern Spain' which allows us to draw new conclusions about texts we thought we knew well. The author reads Cervantes, Tirso, Calderón, Garcilaso and others from outside their texts, marking ways in which those texts are not (exclusively) aesthetic, but also social, constructs. 'Power,' 'desire,' 'authority,' 'subjectivity,' and 'marginal social' types all figure prominently in Cascardi's analyses of some of Spain's most beloved and revered authors." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review
“This book presents an important argument about the ideological force of literature in the Golden Age.”
—Stephen Rupp, Modern Philology
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.