The Canon and the Archive: Configuring Literature in Modern Spain rethinks the opposition between "canonical" and "non-canonical," opting instead for understanding the literary canon as a segment of the larger archive of literature. Beyond what is presently regarded as canonical, this archive includes previously valued works that have been forgotten, as well as an indefinite supply of works as yet unconsecrated or unknown. Drawing from an eclectic array of theoretical sources - from Stanley Fish, John Guillory, Barbara Hermstein Smith, Pierre Bourdieu, and Itamar Even-Zohar to Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida - Wadda C. Rios-Font re-reads nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish texts and authors that have tested the boundary between high and low, repositioning them within Spanish critical tradition. Through these self-reflexive readings, the book explores how the definition of literature has changed in more than two centuries of modernity in Spain, and the institutional and cultural negotiations behind this change.