Torn between the need to satisfy the censor and their desire to please readers, the narrators of the Spanish `novella' of the golden Age always promised teaching and delighting, although they wrote about adultery, crimes of passion and cross dressing. Many critics have stated the incompatibility of theory and practice in the Spanish 16th- and 17th-century `novella'. Carmen Rabell takes issue with this view, arguing that both the Spanish `novella' and literary theory followed the same complex tendency to mix and overlap classical, ecclesiastical and biblical discourses in order to defend imaginative literature from any possible moral or philosophical objective. She does this with reference to Novelas a Marcia Leonarda, in which Spanish literary theory is presented by a narrator who tries both to teach and seduce his ambivalent female reader.
CARMEN R. RABELL is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Pittsburgh.