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This paper aims to consider Martin del Barco Centenera's Argentina y conquista del Río de la Plata (1602) as a blending of history and fiction, in the context of an epistemic revolution that took place during the European Renaissance Era and the preceptive reading of Aristotle's Poetics in Italy and Spain. This paper exposes how this epic poem was elaborated with evidentially modalizations and other rhetoric resources to provide a credible testimony and its moralizating point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Balzac's Poetics of the Novel as expressed in his famous prologue to La Comédie humaine. Firstly, I examine a particular reading of the main tenets of this text, which, by focusing on modern science, makes the latter the essential model of La Comédie humaine. Secondly, I offer a new reading from a hermeneutical perspective. Consquently, it may be concluded that Balzac in his prologue refused to understand the human world by means of biological categories, thus becoming a forerunner of Dilthey's differentiation between Natural and Human Sciences (Geisteswissenschaften, 'Sciences of the Spirit'). Lastly, it is necessary to underline what the "Avant-Propos" owes to the literary model of Walter Scott and of the tradition of the novel in general, whose defense and vindication is arguably among Balzac's aims in this theoretical text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of authors and literary exemplification in the Spanish grammar, through the case of Nouvelle méthode pour apprendre facilement et en peu de temps la langue espagnole (NME) by Claude Lancelot (1660). Specifically, we focus on the influence of literary criticism, which is often detectable in the history of Spanish grammar. We conserve traces of this influence: two letters sent by Jean Chapelain to the grammarian of Port Royal. After analyzing the NME, we can conclude that Lancelot is well advised, not only by the literary criticism but also by poetic sources (Arte poética española, Rengifo 1592) and grammatical sources (La Parfaicte Methode, Charpentier 1596). Apart from these influences, Lancelot makes room for his own esthetic ideas: he likes religious authors as Rivadeneyra, Fray Luis de Granada or Juan de Ávila, and he knows about Gracián's success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analises how the prophet Elijah is represented in the Spanish theatre in the 16th and 17th centuries. The following plays are commented on: Tragaedia Jezabelis, Tragoedia cui nomen inditum Achabus (both belonging to Jesuit college drama), La mujer que manda en casa by Tirso de Molina, La viña de Nabot by Rojas Zorrilla, La representación de la vida y rapto de Elías profeta by Matías de los Reyes, and El vengador de los cielos y rapto de Elías by Bances Candamo. Matías de los Reyes' play is here subject to critical scrutiny for the first time; a modern edition is still due. The most relevant results are: Jesuit drama anticipates some of the developments of the Elijah theme that take place later in popular and court theatre; playwrights work quite unrestrainedly in reshaping the Biblical material, and they tend to tighten the temporal and causal connections of events and characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I shall explore Cervantes' role as an "exemplary" model for the establishment of the aesthetics of Realism in France, which characterizes the modern novel in the 17th century. Through a comparative analysis, I shall highlight the influence of Don Quixote on the works of Charles Sorel and Paul Scarron (among others). By deploying strategies of parody and satire which are similar to Cervantes', their novels implied a critical reaction against the heroic and sentimental works by Madeleine de Scudéry and Honoré d'Urfé. At the same time, the authors studied here should be regarded as forerunners to the renewal of the picaresque genre led by Lesage and the moral tales by Marivaux and Diderot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the pamphlet printed by Juan de Mongastón in 1611 about Logroño's Auto de Fe (1610) and its special emphasis on the witches judged on 7 and 8 November. This paper maintains that this pamphlet, which is of undeniable historical interest, must be approached from a literary perspective, since, as will be shown, it is actually a literary text, although it has never been viewed from that perspective. To justify these claims we will rely on the connection established by Francisco Rico and José Miguel Barandiarán, and the current narrative interpretation of witchcraft (Dolan, Rowland, Rowlands, Gibson, Clark, Rushton, Gaskill, Purkiss and Gentilcore) as well as contributions by Caro Baroja, Henningsen, Dueso and Azurmendi about the “Zugarramurdi's Witches". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper casts light on a satirical political work written in July of 1685, which is an example of the occasional literature displaying títulos de comedias. Since it follows the formal characteristics of the epistolary genre, its value is outstanding, due to its rarity. The text describes a palace scandal in which an azafata to the Queen Marie Louise of Orléans, known as la Cantina, was accused of high treason. Following a concise examination of the historical episode, the author offers an annotated edition of the satire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the controversial inclusion of Lope de Vega's Roma abrasada in the genre of tragedy. Paying attention to the context of the first play which Lope himself referred to as a “tragedy", Roma abrasada is set against the tradition of the late 16th century tragedy in order to study how it follows it and how –maybe due to the new perspective of the comedia nueva– it deviates from it, opening (although quite imperfectly) the way for what would eventually become the “tragedia española". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the functions of the publisher and patron in the publication of printed books during the 16th Century. With this purpose, the activity of Fernando Basurto, author, and Juan Fernandez de Heredia, patron-editor, about the first edition of Florindo published in Zaragoza by Pedro Hardouin in 1530 is studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper consists of a study on José Ángel Valente's poetry througout its conceptual shapes. These shapes will be understood as symbolic projections which work as a bridge between a material poetic order and a spiritual one. First of all, we will study some abstract concepts like the point, the line, or the circle, and then we will observe more tangible aspects like the value and the role of colour in Valente's universe. Other aspects that we will study are, for example, the amplitude of the poetic space, and the direction traversed by the different symbolic elements of the poetry. All these factors allow us broadening the understanding of José Ángel Valente's poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diachronic research has often made use of metalinguistic remarks made by "prestigious" speakers as a way to reconstruct past stages of a given language. The question arises as to what point these remarks can be considered objective. This issue is addressed here by paying attention to the time span between 1940 and 1960 and to Emilio Lorenzo's remarks about the evolution of Sp. o sea. Lorenzo's intuitions can be (dis)confirmed by checking them against the rae CORDE corpus. Building on the conclusions extracted from o sea, the last part of this paper establishes some methodological remarks regarding the diachronic study of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of no obstante ('notwithstanding') has been affected by some theoretical preconceptions, which have influenced both the explanation of its emergence as a grammatical device in Castilian language and its description in contemporary Spanish. These misguided descriptions have been motivated by the use of our current grammatical intuition, which considers no obstante the result of a Latin heritage. The entailment to Latin has supported, also, the description of no obstante + NP as an absolute construction. Moreover, the influence of the Theory of Grammaticalization, which usually does not pay much attention to the textual conditions of grammatical forms production, has favoured the neglect of textual contexts that give rise to the Castilian discourse marker no obstante. In this paper, we try to demonstrate that, in the sequences no obstante + NP and no obstante que, no obstante has been reanalyzed as being only a grammatical element with a prepositional function. Further, we deal with the evidence that, in spite of its Latin form, no obstante was introduced into Castilian language via Catalan or Aragonese languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose a review of two metalinguistic categories: [+/- innovative] and [+/- grammaticalized]. On the basis of some analogies in theiruse by different frameworks of historical linguistics (a traditional one, the comparative-historical method, and a modern one, the grammaticalization theories), I argue that both of them can be described in terms of "sequential models" and I deal with the way this kind of model takes account of language change. Historical evidence is brought in from several well-known Romance structures, and in particular, from the development of present perfects in Spanish and French, in order to point out to some of the methodological limits of the models: firstly the existence of mismatches between the sequential structure and empirical data, due to a high level of generalization in hypothesis, and secondly, what I will call the "stage 0 fallacy". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The court theater of Francisco Bances Candamo serves as a medium for studying the relationships between power and literature that existed in the Golden Age in general, and in the court of Carlos II in particular. Within this context, Bances Candamo's theater pursues a pedagogical goal tied to the policies of the monarch, to which the playwright adds references to contemporary politics, and above all, presents images of the ideal monarch. This paper demonstrates the impossibility of discovering, in the courtly comedies of Bances Candamo, elements interpretable as criticisms of royal power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]