Teoría de la Épica en el Renacimiento Portugués

Abstract

An introduction and revision, in Spanish, of literary theory in 16th and early 17th- century Portugal, divided into four sections: 1. Prologue 2. The Portuguese have not got a tête théorique? 3. Theory of narrative: the development of a model 4. Theory of imitation: agon between contemporaries. Several previously accepted ideas in scholarly publications are put forward and revised or rejected here, including the lack of theoretical and critical writing by Portuguese early modern authors, the initial absence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, misunderstandings around the Horatian concept of in medias res and principles of literary history based on Renaissance theoretical writing. Furthermore, one of the first open defences ever written of the autonomous organic nature of Poetics in the West is shown to be by a Portuguese. In the last section, a case of poetic rivalry shows how much of a refined practice of coeval imitation existed in Portugal during the mid-to-late 1500s.