Fernando Plata Parga
My research focuses on issues of textual scholarship and literary history in Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and other early modern Spanish writers. Textual scholarship as a discipline views all editing as an act of interpretation, to borrow McGann’s formulation.
In other words, the study and analysis of the textual transmission of a poem is itself a hermeneutic activity, not just the mechanical application of an ecdotic methodology.
In my publications, textual criticism opens the door to the examination of larger theoretical and practical issues: the modus operandi of the Spanish Inquisition regarding book censorship; the reception of the classics; books and libraries in 17th-century Spain; theories of translation; and the fascination that Calderón shows for a pre-cinematic artifact, the mundinovo or raree-show, to give just a few examples