La épica de los Jesuitas: juicios y comentarios sobre "El Bernardo", de Balbuena
ISSN: 1131-9879
Year of publication: 2018
Issue: 28
Pages: 73-93
Type: Article
More publications in: Cuadernos de estudios del siglo XVIII
Abstract
Since the second half of the xviii century, Spain needed to demonstrate the rest of European nations the quality of its literature. They tried in different ways to recover canonic texts that could show an image of national value. One of these ways was, for instance, the assessment of the epic genre. In this essay, we analyze the aim of Juan Francisco Masdeu, expelled Jesuit, who, with other members of the Company, recovered the figure of Bernardo de Balbuena and his heroic poem El Bernardo o Victoria de Roncesvalles (1624) with the objective of proposing Balbuena as the Spanish version of Tasso.