He tackles the flexibility of the miscelánea as a genre by assessing the conceptual, thematic and formal aspects of such works, and exploring the interaction of these features.
Bradbury examines in particular the later inclusion of explicitly fictional components, such as poetic compositions and short prose fiction, alongside the vulgarisation of erudite or inaccessible prose material, which was the primary function of the earlier Spanish miscellanies.
His work illuminates the relationship between the Golden Age Spanish miscellany and those of the classical world and humanist milieu, and illustrates how the vernacular tradition moved away from these forebears. His comprehensive analysis of the miscelánea corrects long-standing misconceptions, starting from its poorly-understood terminology, and erects divisions between it and other related genres. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular readership. Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. It highlights the precocious modernity of much early modern Spanish literature, and shows how the gap between modern ideas and social reality stimulated creative literary responses in subsequent periods as well as howcontemporary writers have adjusted to Spain's recent accelerated modernization. The book introduces a general readership to the ways in which Spanish literature has been read, in and outside Spain, explaining misconceptions,outlining the insights of recent scholarship and suggesting new readings. A multilayered history of exile has produced a transnational literary production, while writers in Spain have engaged with European cultural trends.This Very Short Introduction explores this rich literary history, which resonates with contemporary debates on transnationalism and cultural diversity. The medieval period produced literature in Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew, and today there is a flourishingliterature in Catalan, Galician, and Basque as well as in Castilian-the language that has became known as 'Spanish'. Spanish literature has given the world the figures of Don Quixote and Don Juan, and is responsible for the 'invention' of the novel in the 16th century.
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