Spanish Golden Age Texts in the Twenty-First Century

The growing challenges posed by the teaching of early modern texts to generations less accustomed to reading and analysing literature makes the need to present these texts in creative and attractive forms all the more pressing. Cervantes, Lope, Calderón, Quevedo and Góngora risk being consigned to the past in many centres of learning if they are not made more accessible to today’s learners.

At the same time, new pedagogical methods based on technologies and multiliteracies afford renewed opportunities to open up these classic texts to higher education students and to the wider public. Learners can be encouraged to engage with key works using a variety of means, including visual media, music and appropriate contextual parallels.
The present volume addresses these concerns and opportunities by assembling pedagogical expertise and good practice to facilitate the task of teaching older texts through new methodologies. It brings together Golden Age scholars from the UK, Spain and the US, who offer different perspectives and approaches drawn from their respective academic contexts. As the volume demonstrates, common concerns clearly exist but so too does the strong belief that there is much to be shared in terms of innovative ideas and practical applications for teaching the great classics of Spain’s Golden Age and helping them retain the place they deservedly occupy in Spanish Studies.

Idoya Puig is Senior Lecturer in Spanish at Manchester Metropolitan University. She holds a PhD in Cervantes and the Novelas ejemplares from Westfield College, University of London. She has published a number of articles on Cervantes and sixteenth-century Spanish culture and society and is editor of Tradition and Modernity: Cervantes’s Presence in Spanish Contemporary Literature (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). She is currently exploring ways to harness new media to teach literary classics and to bring literature back into the language class successfully.

Karl McLaughlin is Senior Lecturer in Spanish Translation and Interpreting at Manchester Metropolitan University. He holds a PhD in Golden Age literature and is the co-author of a modern edition of the poetry of Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán (1618–c.1684). He has also published various recent articles on the work of this little-known author from Extremadura.