Review: Writers on the Market by Donald Gilbert-Santamaria

Writers on the Market: Consuming Literature in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain

Donald Gilbert-Santamaría

Appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, September 2007

Reviewer: Carroll B. Johnson, professor of Spanish literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, was author of Cervantes and the Material World (2000), among other works, and served as president of the Cervantes Society of American from 1998 to 2000.

"Donald Gilbert-Santamaría’s first book is a worthy addition to the body of scholarship that examines the production and consumption of literature in the period described by Marxism as the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Gilbert-Santamaría prefers a non-Marxist thesis that the consumerist culture in which we live functions according to a mechanism first found in Golden Age Spain as purchasers of a commodity, had become the arbiters of meaning and artistic quality [...] This is a book worth reading, gracefully written and subtly argued, full of useful insights as well as corroboration, from a new perspective, of some received truths. One may disagree with some of Gilbert-Santamaría’s hypotheses and conclusions, but almost everything in his book is stimulating and thought-provoking. We scholars cannot aspire to more."