This volume address the role of literature in the formation of cultural notions of 'state, ' 'nation, ' 'subject, ' and 'citizen' in Spain from the Renaissance to the Romantic period. It brings together literary scholars and historians of the Golden Age and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a dialog framed by the rise and dissolution of the Absolutist state. Individual essays attempt to understand relationships between subjectivity and the state in Spain from the earliest articulations of the subject to the consolidation of an array of bourgeois subjectivities. The major argument running throughout the volume is that literary discourse, from the time it emerges in the sixteenth century to the time it coheres within a wholly modern concept of the aesthetic, actively develops forms of subjectivity in relation to institutions of class power. The intention of the volume is to clarify central problems regarding the emergence and function of literature across distinct modes of production, state formations, and hegemonic cultures. This book keeps open a debate on the long process through which literature and the aesthetic come to be constituted as a complex arena in which-sometimes directly, more often indirectly-the struggle for state power unfolds.