The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain: A Study in Literary Form

• Traces the evolution of classical Aristotelian-Ciceronian notions of perfect friendship into an independent formal principle within the literary production of early modern Spain
• Chapters covering several important genres from the period including the interpolated short story, the pastoral novel, the comedia, and the picaresque novel
• Argues for a dialectical transformation within the poetics of friendship as an important influence in the oft-cited modernity of Cervantes’s Don Quixote
• Explores the relationship between friendship and other key problems associated with literary representation in the period: subjectivity, verisimilitude, exemplarity, and imitatio, among others

Donald Gilbert-Santamaría 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. He traces the trajectory for such a poetics through key prose and theatrical works culminating in an analysis of Don Quixote where friendship emerges as an important formal influence in Cervantes’s 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.