In the Spanish Golden Age, the new literary mode of vernacular prose
fiction was deplored by many authorities for setting bad examples,
undermining reality by deceiving with lies, and persuading in the face
of rational disbelief. Dr Ife here examines the connection between the
objections posed to this fiction and those raised two thousand years
earlier by Plato. This book shows how the aims and results of
'picaresque' novel writing in fact counter such objections. In a study
of three sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish novels Dr Ife
demonstrates that the authors consciously exploited their readers'
response to a narrative in order to bring them to a clearer
understanding of their own experience. In this way the very process of
representation deplored by the Platonist critics may be regarded as
having a moral validity of its own. Additional English translations are
provided of all the key extracts studied.