Culture and the State in Spain, 1550-1850

This volume represents an attempt to understand relationships between subjectivity and the state in Spain from the earliest articulations of the "subject" during the Renaissance to the consolidation of an array of bourgeois subjectivities in the mid-nineteenth century. The major argument running throughout the volume is that "literary discourse," from the time it emerges in the sixteenth century to the time it coheres within a wholly modern concept of the "aesthetic," actively develops forms of subjectivity in relation to institutions of class power. Whether we are concerned with the spread of mercantile social relations within waning feudalism or with the cultural "naturalization" of fully capitalist social relations, "literature" reflects the emergence of sensibilities which seek to coordinate and unify the economic, linguistic, political, and social conditions for individual experience. The overall picture of subject formation and state formation presented in this volume, therefore, starts from the initial "autonomy" of "literature" as a sphere of subjectivity for early modern political elites and moves toward the nineteenth-century generalization of the "aesthetic" as a bourgeois sphere in which both state-imposed and self-conferred forms of political subjectivity are realized. Book jacket.