The Lazarillo Phenomenon addresses a fundamental question in Hispanic Studies, why do we continue studying La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes? As a classic literary text, Lazarillo's destiny depends on the relations it establishes over time with individuals and institutions responsible for literary, commercial, and ideological matters. This book brings together nine literary scholars from different critical approaches who address this question and reconsider the state of Lazarillo studies. At its heart, the uncertainty that still surrounds Lazarillo are the same questions that remain open about most of sixteenth-century Spanish literature. The fact is that what we know about the period and its literature is infinitely smaller than what we don't know. The Lazarillo Phenomenon directs the reader's attention away from traditional concerns and toward different areas such as the complexities surrounding the production, transmission, and reception of the novel across time, and the wide-ranging social, historical, political, literary, economic, and religious circumstances in which it was written, banned, censured, and finally re-circulated. As a whole, The Lazarillo Phenomenon explores the anonymous novel as a battleground where opposite political forces fought to control Lazaro's voice, as a text that reveals how deceptive were the representational arts in the Trastamara period, as a secular adaptation of the Odyssey in which the divine elements have been replaced by material concerns, as a meticulously constructed revelation of a cover-up, as powerful evidence that poverty and sin were regarded as closely related in early modern Spanish society, and as an archeological artifact. Some of the authors approach the novel from new critical angles, others question or challenge some of the historiographical notions predominant in the field, such as the "picaresque novel," the "Spanish Golden Age" label, or the notion of an "original" text. All essays contribute to answering the question, "Why continue to study Lazarillo?" by showing that much remains to be said about it. The Lazarillo Phenomenon illustrates that despite the enormous amount of research already invested in the anonymous novel, it still has much left to offer.
