The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain

'Too often in our literary studies, there is an artificial separation between formalists and historicists, between theory and empirical analysis. Donald Gilbert-Santamaría¿s study of the poetics of friendship delicately synthesises these competing practices and together they greatly enrich the reader¿s understanding of how literary texts actually worked in early modern Spain.'
Edward Baker, author of La biblioteca de Don Quijote
Explores male friendship as a poetic principle in early modern Spanish writing
This book shows how the Aristotelian-Ciceronian notion of perfect male friendship operates as an independent poetic force within the development of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Donald Gilbert-Santamaría traces the trajectory for such a poetics through key prose and theatrical genres culminating in an analysis of Don Quixote where friendship emerges as an important formal influence in Cervantes' novel. With chapters covering several important genres from the period including the pastoral novel and the comedia, the book explores the relationship between friendship and other key problems associated with literary representation in the period: subjectivity, exemplarity and imitatio, among others.
Donald Gilbert-Santamaría is Associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Washington.
Cover image: Lothario writing a final letter asking Anselmo to forgive Camilla before his death, engraving by Gustave Dore, from Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, Volume I, 1880-1881 edition © akg-images / De Agostini Picture Library
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ISBN 978-1-4744-5804-7
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