Writers on the Market: Consuming Literature in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain »

The beginning of the seventeenth century in Spain marked a rapid rise in the commercial market for cultural production. This work examines the evolution of the commercial market as reflected in the maturation of two genres: the public theater and the novel. Through a comparative analysis of the playwright Lope de Vega and the novelists Mateo Aleman and Miguel de Cervantes, this study explores the new poetic principles, both implicit and explicit, that accompany the rise of commercialized literature and argues that the logic of classical economic theory became internalized within the poetic structure of these two genres.