Reading and Fiction in Golden-Age Spain: A Platonist Critique and Some Picaresque Replies (Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies) - Softcover

Ife, B. W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521121205 ISBN 13: 9780521121200

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2009

Synopsis

In the Spanish Golden Age, the new literary mode of vernacular prose fiction was deplored by many authorities for setting bad examples, undermining reality by deceiving with lies, and persuading in the face of rational disbelief. Dr Ife here examines the connection between the objections posed to this fiction and those raised two thousand years earlier by Plato. This book shows how the aims and results of 'picaresque' novel writing in fact counter such objections. In a study of three sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish novels Dr Ife demonstrates that the authors consciously exploited their readers' response to a narrative in order to bring them to a clearer understanding of their own experience. In this way the very process of representation deplored by the Platonist critics may be regarded as having a moral validity of its own. Additional English translations are provided of all the key extracts studied.

About this title

Book Description

In the Spanish Golden Age, the new literary mode of vernacular prose fiction was deplored by many authorities for setting bad examples, undermining reality by deceiving with lies, and persuading in the face of rational disbelief. Dr Ife here examines the connection between such contemporary objections to fiction and those raised two thousand years earlier by Plato.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0521121205
• ISBN 13: 9780521121200
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224