Comedia: Art and History

Through readings of plays by six Spanish Golden Age dramatists, Blue examines relations between the work of art and its historical moment. While offering new insights into the plays, Blue tries to bridge what he sees as the two macro-currents of twentieth-century criticism: the archaelogical and the literary interpretive. He brings to bear elements of structuralism, semiotics, reader-response criticism, deconstruction, and new historical approaches on comedia. From the readings, the plays emerge as fields of con- flict on which the artistic, symbolic, and historical-cultural forces converge but do not merge either in the action or in the quick-silver, ambiguous language of the plays.