ABSTRACT
The Spanish philological school may be defined as originating more or less in 1914 under the aegis of the eminent philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal. When, during the late seventies, other theoretical doctrines and variants began to articulate different perspectives and address other problematics, the Spanish critical world was startled and perplexed. Alexander Parker and the British school dared to take on the picaresque and the Spanish comedia; they were immediately repulsed. Cervantes studies emerged forcefully in exile where, understandably, the aesthetic distance from the novel, found lacking in Spanish critics, derived from and echoed the expatriates' forced detachment from Spain. Astoundingly, Spanish literature's major opus has withstood the fewest critical approaches, even the most jingoistic, since it was assigned, early on, an implicitly organicist essentiality. The party responsible has recently been inducted into the Real Academia de la Lengua Espanola, the institution that once guarded and stood for the rigor and exactness of Spanish philological studies.
