Literary absolutism: "Fable" and "history" in Spain and Peru (1670-1900). (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

The object of this study is the polemics of "history" and "fable" as these were defined and practiced in the Poetics and Rhetoric of Spain and Peru from the Late-Baroque (ca. 1670-1770) to the end of the nineteenth century. This debate arose within the reorganization of knowledge and power, within the New Science and Bourbon Absolutism. "Literary Absolutism" then expresses two simultaneous and interdependent developments: (1) the Cartesian method's domination of discourses in the arts and sciences: and (2) the projects and practices of members of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters, who felt compelled and empowered to police and polish the Republic by forging an alliance with powerful political and religious officials. I pursue the origins, extent, and forms of the discussions around "fable" and "history," through the interventions of well-known figures of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Spanish American letters. Types of discourses and authors include: natural history (Azara, Llano Zapata, Juan, Ulloa); prose fiction (Fenelon, Coyer, Isla, Cadalso, Botelho de Moraes, Santa Cruz y Espejo, Forner); civil and religious histories (Arzans, Alvarez de Toledo, Peramas); Crown relaciones (Carrio, Amat, Jauregui, Armendaris, Manso de Velasco, Feijoo de Sosa); Church consueta, synodals, edicts; poetry and drama (Moratin, Peralta, Lavarden, Iriarte); critique, intellectual and philosophical histories (Feijoo, Selis, Sarmiento, Verney, Vico, Muratori, Mayans, Rollin, Mohedano, Voltaire, Michelet); manuals of Logic, Rhetoric, and Poetics (Aristotle, Cicero, Nicole, Arnauld, Luzan, Boileau, Rapin, Bouhours, Guerrero Pabon, Madramany). I propose a tripartite division of historians and other intellectuals into (1) Catholic radicals, (2) Scholastics or traditionalists, and (3) Catholic humanists, while arguing for a theoretical distinction between the Catholic and Christian Enlightenments based on the affinities between Italy, Portugal, and Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I explore the French Neoclassicist concept of Gothicism, which naturalized the ideological shift in the fate of those three countries from high to low cultures; the formation of the Spanish Golden Age canon; and the nineteenth-century folklorization of Spanish American colonial historiography.