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A Novel Community: Pastoral Pseudonyms, La Galatea, and the Academia Imitatoria in Madrid, 1585

Abstract This article contests the standard view of Golden Age works as political, whether conformist or subversive, by arguing that, in the case of Cervantes at least, Golden Age creation is best viewed in the light of the particular aesthetic debates of late sixteenth-century Madrid. The focus is on La Galatea, Cervantes’s neglected early prose work, a roman à clef in which we not only encounter the poets and patrons of 1580s Madrid in pastoral disguise, but also gain access to a number of contemporary literary debates. No work of Cervantes offers a clear statement of his ars poetica, though critics have often sought one in the mouths of his fictional characters; however, this article argues that La Galatea, because it stages the poetic debates in which Cervantes intervened, is a key text for understanding the aesthetic concerns that accompanied its production: nothing less than the birth of the modern novel.