La Celestina : A Novel

Abstract

In this essay I argue that La Celestina should be read as a novel. The work is impossible to perform in a theater: it is not a drama. Neither is it a humanistic co-medy, either in form or spirit. That a novel can be written in the form of a series of letters is not controversial, even though there is no narrator. In a similar way, there is —as Cervantes explained in his introduction to his Coloquio de los perros— an implicit narrative link between the segments of dialogue in his work. La Celestina is a work of the Renaissance (not the Middle Ages), and it has always been read as a novel. It is the first great novel of the print age.