Early Modern Spain


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The Origins of the Novel - Full Rationale

In order to understand better the relationship between writing about America and the growth of prose fiction in Spain, Barry Ife and Bob Goodwin have been collaborating on a study called 'Towards a History of the Novel in Early Modern Spain: Sources, Narrative Techniques and Lexis in the Chronicles of the New World.' The following rationale was submitted as part of the application:

Context

Spanish prose fiction from the 1490s to the mid 17th century presents a range of texts of unparalleled richness and variety. Nevertheless, little attempt has been made to explain why this explosion of new genres and styles of writing should have taken place when and where it did. In two recent studies (Ife 1994-95, 1986) I have outlined some of the circumstances which may have contributed to the production of sophisticated prose fiction in Spain much earlier than in other European countries: such features include an advanced system of education, a high level of literacy, and the possession of an overseas empire whose conquest was narrated in a large body of written accounts.

Aims and Objectives

The aim of the project is to investigate the ways in which this body of Spanish writing about the New World exerted an influence on the growth of prose fiction in Spain. Although the possibility of a causal relationship between the early Spanish novel and the historiography of the New World has often been noted, it has not been systematically examined. The objectives will be to answer two principal questions: to what extent were the writers of the chronicles themselves influenced by classical and medieval historical and literary sources, so that they might be said to be a means of transmitting classical approaches to narrative into the early modern period (eg Ife 1986, 1998); and to what extent writing about the New World stimulated new approaches to imaginative writing and helped to extend the language of fiction in the sixteenth century. The first question is posed by the frequent though usually unsubstantiated assertion that Spanish chroniclers used 'conceptual strategies taken from prior literature' and 'simply assimilated their experiences to the fantastic and marvelous descriptions of classical and medieval encyclopedists' (Santa Arias in Williams and Lewis, Early Images of the Americas, 164-5). The second springs from the equally commonplace assumption that, for example, one of Bernal Díaz's sources for the description of Tenochtitlan was the chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula.

Methodology

Answers to these two questions involve examining two types of relationship between three bodies of writing: classical histories, new-world chronicles and early-modern prose fiction. The first relationship involves looking closely into the types of imitation from classical and medieval historians practised by a number of Spanish chroniclers, especially Columbus (Ife 1990, 1992), Cortés, Las Casas, López de Gómara, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (Ife 1986) and Acosta. The second requires a systematic comparison of narrative strategies in these writers with approaches to parallel themes in chivalric and other romance, including Cervantes's Persiles y Sigismunda, and other fictional genres including the picaresque. Examples of comparable narrative episodes include journeys by land and sea, encounters, battles, descriptions of landscape and cities, habits of the natives, expressions of wonderment, ineffability, and so on. By building up a repertoire of narrative segments of this kind, it should be possible to be reasonably confident of comparing like with like, notwithstanding differences in genre and language between texts.

It is also intended to carry out a small quantitative survey of lexis among the Spanish texts, in order to gauge relative rates of growth in vocabulary between genres throughout the long sixteenth century. This part of the work will necessarily have to be restricted in scope, for reasons of time and because the majority of sources are not yet available in digital form. However, a pilot study using 10,000 word samples from 20 texts dating from between 1492 and 1617 will be undertaken during the period of the project, and this work is expected to yield sufficient evidence about vocabulary growth for outline conclusions to be drawn

We expect to publish the results of this work as two books: Re-Writing the Conquest, and The Origins of the Novel in Spain. The texts which form the basis of the lexical study are available in the etexts section of this website. The first book will deal with some of the material factors which contributed to the strength of Golden-Age fiction (printing, publishing, literacy, readership) as well as discussing some common themes in fictional and non-fictional writing in 16th and 17th century Spain. The second book was originally intended to be a chapter in the first, but outgrew its format. It will argue that the secondary literature on Spanish accounts of discovery and conquest is full of anecdotal observations to support the contention that New World writing was heavily dependent on sources and techniques from Old World writing, particularly historical writing. But this contention needs to be looked at in a more systematic way, and the book will study the way in which narrative material was recycled, often over several generations of text transmission between Spain and the New World. The book will be organised around several strands or cycles of related texts:

 

 

 


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