Orígenes de la novela, Tomo III by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo
"Orígenes de la novela, Tomo III" by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo is a literary-historical study and anthology written in the early 20th century. The volume examines the origins of the Spanish novel through “novelas dialogadas,” centering on La Celestina and its imitators, and pairs a substantial scholarly introduction with edited texts that illustrate language, style, and print conventions of the period. It combines close textual scholarship, source studies, and reception history to
show how a dramatic form nourished both later theater and narrative fiction. The opening of the volume begins with the transcriber’s notes on typographic conventions, a reordering of index and errata, and a table of contents that previews an extensive introduction followed by representative dialogued fictions. The introduction then argues that La Celestina, though fundamentally a dramatic poem rather than a novel, is indispensable to a history of the Spanish novel because of its realist method and enduring influence. It traces early editions and transformations from Comedia to Tragicomedia, details added acts and prologues, and parses paratexts (including Alonso de Proaza’s acrostics) to discuss authorship. The study presents Fernando de Rojas as the principal (indeed likely sole) author, reviewing bibliographic evidence and archival findings that identify him as a converso jurist from Puebla de Montalbán/Talavera, probably finishing the work as a young university man, with Salamanca and humanist Latin comedies as formative context. It emphasizes the book’s design for reading rather than stage performance and shows how its form, sources, and language shaped both Spanish drama and prose narrative. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Andrés V. Galia, Tony Browne, Santiago and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
Reading Level
Reading ease score: 59.3 (10th to 12th grade). Somewhat difficult to read.
