Historia de Hipólito y Aminta de Francisco de Quintanaestudio y edición crítica

Resumen

According to its title, this thesis covers the study and critical edition of the Historia de Hipólito y Aminta written by Francisco de Quintana. The novel, published for the first time in the year 1627, was lately republished several times until its latest reprinting in the nineteenth century. Due to the editorial emptiness since this last edition and the shortage of studies about the work until the present moment, we established as initial objectives of the research the fulfillment of the contemporary edition of the History of Hipólito y Aminta, with the purpose of publishing it again after almost two centuries of oblivion, and the production of a complete and exhaustive study of the work that enables us to locate it in the author’s literary group and analyses all its narrative aspects. In accordance with this approach, the thesis is divided in two main parts: the edition itself and its complementary study. Regards the first point, we present here a critical edition that incorporates an exhaustive comparison of all the editions (1635, 1637, 1673, 1729 and 1806-1807) and plenty of footnotes about several linguistic, literary and cultural aspects. The comparison of the six editions has been elaborated with copies of the previous editions catalogued in the Spanish National Library. The objectives that we had at the beginning of the comparison were mainly two: firstly, the description of all the variations found in the editions by addition, suppression, immutability and transmutation, together with copies of the princeps edition. Secondly, the analysis of these textual variations in order to extract from the work the text of the edition and to calibrate afterwards the probable participation of the author in the elaboration and revision of the published editions during his life. Taking into account that all the subsequent editions to the princeps come, directly or indirectly, from this one, and that the later variations adulterate in most of the cases the original sense of the first edition, we chose the publishing of the first edition of the novel, born to life in Madrid from the Luis Sanchez’s widow’s printing press at the end of the year 1627. Regarding the participation of Quintana in the elaboration and revision of the later editions, we end up admitting, for linguistic as much as extra literary reasons, that the author did not take part in the preparation of the following editions to the princeps, and that it was the author himself who assigned this task to the editor, Andrés Grande, or even that this editor allotted it to a third person. Once we have established the text of the edition, we proceed to its digital transcription and, once finished, to the writing of all the linguistic aspects (morphologic, syntactic and lexical-semantic), literary (topics, poetical figures, literary sources...), narrative (characters, narrator, tense, style...) and cultural (historic, social, philosophical, religious) that enable a complete comprehension of the work. The exhaustiveness that also encouraged us to this purpose supposes the reason why the textual edition has almost 2600 footnotes about the different aspects reviewed. The second part of this project, although it appears in the first place, consists in the study and analysis of the novel in the author’s literary group. As the studies about Francisco de Quintana up to now are short and all the biographic information comes from secondary sources, we decided that our main objective of the thesis was the contribution of new data about the life and personality of its author. For that reason, we proceeded to the research of primary sources of two main archives, the National Historic Archive in Madrid and the Ecclesiastical Archive in Toledo. Thanks to this archivist research, we have managed to bring out unpublished and unknown data about Francisco de Quintana by the contemporary critics. The rest of the study deals about his written work, with a division in two main parts: the first one about all his written work, except the novel we have researched, that is; the poetical compositions, the sacred oratory and his first novel, Experiencias de amor y fortuna; and a second part, wider and more extensive, about the Historia de Hipólito y Aminta, in which we have studied several aspects, such as editorial -editorial history, editorial criteria and editions of the novel-, narrative -with an special focus in the analysis of the history and the speech-, and interpretative , where we include, together with the critics’ consideration, a personal opinion about the novel. Finally, we have included an appendix with some of the researched documents from the archives and all the consulted bibliography at the end of the thesis.