The Spanish Arcadia

Irigoyen-García provides incisive new ideas about the social and ethnocentric uses of the genre, as well as its interrelation with ideas of race, animal husbandry, and nation building in early modern Spain.

Javier Irigoyen-García is an associate professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His previous work, The Spanish Arcadia, is also published by the University of Toronto Press.

‘The Spanish Arcadia is a beautifully written, insightful and well-researched study. Irigoyen-Garcia provides a wealth of information about Spanish historiography and the fashioning of national identity.’

Oiol Miro Marti:

‘What makes this a great academic achievement is that it plays a big part in finding a meaningful global interpretation of the heterogeneous pastoral manifestation in early modern Spain.’

Jean Dangler, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Tulane University:

“A fascinating and erudite book. Irigoyen-García combines literary, historical, and cultural analysis with critical theory to demonstrate the ways in which writers and painters in early modern Spain used sheep herding, the shepherd, and the pastoral to reinforce or oppose efforts toward ethnic, cultural, and religious exclusion and homogenization.”