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Summary | Rationale | Contributors | Etexts | Publications
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.
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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.
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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:
- Columbus, who frequently re-wrote himself, and was re-written by Las Casas, through the multiple recension of the Diario, the 1493 letters (Carta a Santangel, Santangel letter, Carta a los Reyes,
Monarchs letter) and Las Casas’s Historia de las Indias, which was itself subject to multiple revisions
- Cortés, whose accounts underwent considerable changes in public and official attitude (Cartas de relación: Primera relación - Carta de Veracruz, Segunda relación, Tercera relación, Cuarta relación, Quinta relación) and had to be re-written by Gómara and Bernal Díaz
- Motolinia, the Franciscan apologist whose writings constitute a form of anthology, frequently re-used by the writer himself
and heavily plagiarised by Las Casas
- Oviedo, whose work - Historia general y natural de las Indias: Part 1 (1535) and Part 2, Book 35 - , though difficult to access, is increasingly central to our understanding of the way in which many classical sources (Pliny,
Herodotus and accounts of the life of Alexander) are recycled in New World writing
- Cabeza de Vaca, whose Naufragios (Zamora, 1542) are a test case for the overlap of history and fiction in early-modern Spain and Spanish America
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