Historiografía literaria y nacionalismo Español: Garcilaso de la Vega o el linaje del hombre invisible

The significance of Garcilaso de la Vega (15017-1536) in Spanish literary historiography can be summarized in two commonplaces: first, that Garcilaso is the best representative of the Renaissance in Spain, and second, that Garcilaso's poetry can only be understood in the wider context of Europe. These assertions posit categorical answers to some of the most insidious questions about Spanish culture, such as whether Spain had a Renaissance at all, or whether Spain is, as the slogan goes, "different" from the rest of Europe.

Paying close attention to the claims and insights of some of the strongest champions of the medieval tradition of cancionero poetry - critics like Antonio Rodriguez Monino or Keith Whinnom - , this study aims to uncover the degree to which Garcilaso de la Vega's poetry has been affected by the need to retrofit Spanish culture into the European tradition. Most contemporary critics of Garcilaso's poetry insist on presenting it as the beginning of a radical change, as a tradition that still survives, or as a lineage that we can still claim as "ours." It is significant that these critics appeal to the first person plural when pondering Garcilaso's impact on Spanish culture, thus elevating Garcilaso to the category of a founding father, and neutralizing centuries of different readings and readers.

In order to critically and historically map the role of Garcilaso as an agent of cultural identity, this study examines the development of Spanish literary historiography from the second half of the nineteenth century - that is, from the formation of the discipline in Spain -to the present, focusing on some of the most prominent literary historians of Spain: Marcelino Menendez Pelayo, Ramon Menendez Pidal, Americo Castro, Damaso Alonso, Jose Antonio Maravall and Rafael Lapesa, among others. I argue that Garcilaso is a cultural icon that needs to be studied together with the history of Spanish nationalism and, in this sense, that his poetry has been especially burdened by the debate, still open and polemic, about the identity and legitimacy of Spain as a nation. Ill IV Like almost all of us, he carried within him two men, one visible, the other invisible. Pedro Salinas Murio el hombre, mas no su nombre.

Note: Abstract extracted from PDF file via OCR.

Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.

Thesis originally deposited on 2016-02-18 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2017-03-23 16:33:15.