History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature

Bouterwek, Friedrich, 1766-1828Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.8
Word count
641K words
Chapters
65

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Literary HistoryAcademic StudyGenre EvolutionNational NarrativeCanon ReassessmentIberia19th CenturyEuropean LiteraturePortuguese LiteratureSpanish Literature

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature (Vol 2 of 2) by Friedrich BouterwekAuthor: Bouterwek, Friedrich, 1766-1828,Language: English, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jan 19, 2018

Editor's review

This is the English public-domain edition of Volume 2 of Friedrich Bouterwek's History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, falling under Romance literature history. Its value lies in offering an early literary-historiographical perspective that systematically traces the development of Spanish and Portuguese literature and presents a nineteenth-century scholar's evaluative framework for authors, movements, and works. Readers can observe how the writing of literary history has changed over time and use the book as a reference for comparative literature and Iberian studies. As an English translation, it is substantial in length and information density, better suited to consultation by country and period than to continuous reading. For specialists it is a citable secondary source; for general readers, it should be paired with selected primary texts to gain a more concrete sense of the literature. Overall, it is an instrumental work of significance for the history of scholarship, with the main barriers to access being language and background knowledge.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction and table of contents first to clarify the volume's scope and periodization, then select key chapters.
  2. Read alongside selected passages from specific authors' works to avoid encountering only evaluations without a feel for the texts.
  3. Take notes by country or period, mapping the author's judgments on movements and representative figures.
  4. Compare with later literary histories to observe differences in evaluative standards and selection of material.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65

FAQ

Is this a complete two-volume set? According to the available information, this is Volume 2 of History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, not a complete two-volume set. Readers seeking the full structure should look for Volume 1 separately, and should also note the period and thematic range covered by this volume.
Can I read it without any background in Spanish or Portuguese literature? You can, but it will be difficult. This is an English translation of a nineteenth-century scholarly work that presumes some familiarity with authors and works. Complete beginners are advised to read a concise literary history or an anthology first, then return to the relevant chapters here for smoother comprehension.
Are the scholarly views in this book still valid today? It reflects the perspectives and methods of early literary historiography, and some evaluative standards and selections of material differ from contemporary scholarship. Readers should treat it as a document in the history of scholarship—understanding how a nineteenth-century scholar narrated Spanish and Portuguese literature—rather than citing it directly as the latest research.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Bouterwek, Friedrich, 1766-1828 Author

Friedrich Bouterwek (1766–1828) was a German scholar active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though details of his life are limited in publicly available sources. Judging from the works held in this collection, he devoted himself mainly to compiling and commenting on the history of Spanish and Portuguese literature. His representative work, History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature, reflects a systematic survey of the Iberian literary tradition. Works of this kind typically proceed chronologically, covering authors' lives, the content of their works, and stylistic features, and they display the typical character of early literary historiography. Bouterwek's writing emphasizes narrative and synthesis, seeking to present the development of literature within the limits of the available material. His work offers later scholars an early framework for the study of Southern European literature and reflects the German scholarly interest in other European literatures of his time.