Contemporary private poetry anthologies: an unexplored source for the history of reading in Spanish language

Cancioneros ordinarios contemporáneos: una fuente inexplorada para la historia de la lectura en español

Abstract

In contemporary Spanish-speaking countries, many readers transcribed their favorite poems into notebooks, usually by hand — or poems with which they established some kind of aesthetic or emotional connection. Although this practice may resemble that of Renaissance chansonniers, changes in the cultural context substantially alter the use and meaning of these private anthologies. Such notebooks constitute a hitherto unexplored source for the history of literary reception. In this article, we define these cultural artifacts based on a corpus of twenty-three of them; we study them in the context of ordinary practices — of writing, reading, and collecting — and explain their implications for a literary history that embraces the experiences of non-experts.