Francisco de Quevedo

Among early modern Spain’s principal authors, Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (b. 1580–d. 1645) penned a voluminous corpus of texts too numerous to list in their entirety here. Aside from his best-known work, the picaresque narrative, El Buscón, these include allegorical satires, such as Sueños y discursos and La Hora de todos; a varied body of poetry; political treatises, such as Política de Dios and Marco Bruto; historical works, such as España defendida and Grandes anales de quince días; and moral treatises, such as Virtud militante. Quevedo also produced translations of classical texts along with literary commentaries, such as those prefacing his editions of the works of Renaissance poets Fray Luis de León and Francisco de la Torre. Although Quevedo’s fame as a literary giant is well established in Spain and Latin America, he is less known and studied in the English-speaking world than other canonical Spanish writers of his time, like Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Immortalized in the Spanish popular imagination as a witty and scatological humorist, he is also celebrated as a metaphysical poet and as a writer of passionate love poetry. A trademark of Quevedo’s diverse literary works is their exceptional verbal ingenuity, which earned him his reputation as master of the Baroque conceit. The multifaceted nature of his oeuvre is also considered among his distinctive traits. It derives, in part, from the wide spectrum of genres he practices, which logically requires the deployment of multiple rhetorical registers: from the moralistic to the sacred to the erudite to the obscene to the colloquial to the philosophical, among others. His writings are also varied in terms of the mindsets they convey. In Quevedo’s corpus, Counter-Reformation orthodoxy coexists with lude anti-establishment parody, stoic detachment with self-serving political partisanship, historical lucidity with social bias. Such contrasts can be viewed as symptomatic of the tensions inherent in Spanish Baroque culture, at the crosscurrents of doctrinaire thought and modern skepticism. That said, critics have sharply differed in their assessments of Quevedo’s relationship to his context with some highlighting his status as a polemical figure and others regarding him as a man of letters who works within established genre conventions. This article encompasses a methodologically wide spectrum of critical approaches. Like all bibliographies, it is necessarily selective but offers those beginning research on Quevedo a representative sampling of studies on aesthetic, cultural, political, and ideological aspects of his works.

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