Golden tradition and literary canon in the advertisements of the Eco del Comercio (1834-1849)

Abstract

This article examines the presence of Spanish Golden Age literature in the advertisements of the Eco del Comercio. Data extracted from the newspaper are organized according to the three major genres of the Golden Age period: theater, novels, and poetry. The analysis reveals that the theatrical literary canon was composed of Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Tirso; Cervantes was the paradigm of the novel, while in the field of poetry, traditional Castilian lyric poetry was fundamentally valued. But beyond the data, the study of the advertisements suggests the existence of an advertising rhetoric that focuses on coded elements that are repeated to praise both the materiality of the print and the quality of the selection and implementation of the texts. All of this is based on liberal postulates that seem to pursue the literary monumentalization of the advertised canon.