El Sueno Literario En Espana. Consolidacion Y Desarrollo del Genero

El sueno literario en Espana. Consolidacion y desarrollo del genero. By Teresa Gomez Trueba. Madrid: Catedra, 1999. 322 pages. To commend his new book, La muerte de Abel. Poema moral (Madrid, 1789), to the favor of the Real Sociedad de Asturias, Joaquin Jose Queipo de Llano described an imaginary dream that came upon him as he sat on the shores of the Narcea. From the waters of the river emerged a venerable old man and a young lad, each carrying a book that they invited the author-- dreamer to read. Their intentions were to inspire "la Noble Juventud de Asturias" with the thought that the attainment of all knowledge rested on virtue. Queipo de Llano, hoping to insert some freshness into the conventional dedication, drew on a time-honored literary form, the free-standing dream, in which the author falls asleep, and in the ensuing dream encounters a guide who will lead him, in many cases to fantastic places, there to reveal a satiric perspective on human folly, or to impart knowledge or a moral message. Time-honored indeed, the genre that in the Peninsula included creations by Santillana, Bernat Metge, Vives and, of course, Quevedo, had become at the end of the eighteenth century something of a cliche or a set piece. We know, for example, that P. Joaquin Lorenzo Villanueva in prison wrote "once Buenos, y parte de otro, alusivos a los rams sucesos de aquella epoca; los cuales fueron entregados a las llamas en un momento de terror, que entonces crei prudente, y ahora no" (Vida literaria [2 vols.; London, 1825, II, 150]. And that Aragonese writer of such cheerful conceitedness, Jose Mor de Fuentes, writes that he was once asked by a young lady to compose a letter with which she could chide her friends who had failed to answer her letters. "Me sobrevino de improviso," he relates sometime before 1836, "el arranque de contestarle si queria que pusiese la carta en verso, y me replico que le era indiferente. Con este motivo me empene en referir en silva una especie de sumo que lei en una tertulia de guardian espanolas, y mi estreno merecio universal aprobacion" (Bosquejo de su vida y escritos [Madrid, 1943], 20-21). These three obscure references, understandably missing from the good and useful volume that Teresa Gomez Trueba has written, help to document a surprisingly lively genre of literature with similarities, in one or another instance, to Menippean and Lucianesque satires, the humanistic colloquium, imaginary voyages and utopian fiction. The principal task, therefore, is to try to define the genre of the literary dream, and, once defined, to attempt to draw the variations within the lines of its evolution. …