Knowing fictions : picaresque reading in the early modern Hispanic world /
From the relación to the captivity narrative, the Hispanic imperial project relies heavily on the first-person authority of genres whose authenticity undergirds the ideological armature of national consolidation, expansion and conquest. At the same time, increasing pressures for religious conformity...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Philadelphia :
University of Pennsylvania Press,
[2021]
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| Series: | Haney Foundation series.
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| Summary: | From the relación to the captivity narrative, the Hispanic imperial project relies heavily on the first-person authority of genres whose authenticity undergirds the ideological armature of national consolidation, expansion and conquest. At the same time, increasing pressures for religious conformity in Spain as across Europe require subjects to bare their interiority to external authorities, in intimate confessions of their faith. As it emerges in this charged context, the unreliable voice of the picaresque poses a rhetorical challenge to the authority of the witness, destabilizing the possibility of trustworthy representation precisely because he or she is so intimately involved with the material. The picaresque also limns itineraries beyond the metropole, transcending the limited range of foundational texts such as La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes to model alternative relationships to Spain and Spanishness from a distance. Via its imaginative geographies, it thus interrogates the conceptual and actual limits of nation and empire. While the texts themselves chart communities that transcend the nation, they also challenge the idea of a bounded polity from a transnational and imperial optic. Knowing Fictions shows, first, how the fictional serves as an early site of skepticism within Spanish letters, and second, how itinerant texts complicate both national and literary affiliations. |
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| Physical Description: | 174 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780812252613 0812252616 |