The golden century in Hispanicism: Future perspectives

This paper discusses the Golden Age's status in Hispanic Studies curricula and research. After laying out a short history of Hispanism in Britain and underlining the value of present-day research into Golden Age literature, this article points to two research areas of particular potency in the medium and long term. The first is the continuation of the study of Golden Age literary works in order to determine their import in the histories of Spanish literature and world literature. The second is interdisciplinary research in four specific areas. (1) The intertextuality between Golden Age literature and the Spanish and Latin American literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (2) Comparative literature. (3) Literature as the means to understand the complexities of Imperial Spanish society. (4) The history of feminist literature.