Lecturas de un sueño. (Sobre la República Literaria de Saavedra Fajardo)

The author of the República Literaria, a diplomatic voyager from the 17^th Century, dreams of a city of paper: to read a city as if it were a book and to read a book as if it were a journey throughout literary history. Is it possible? On this journey across all of written culture that Saavedra describes, where the inhabitants of the city are authors of 'literary' texts and the arts live together with the sciences and the muses, the author analyses with subtle irony the present and the tradition of everything that surrounds the production of all that is written. With the classic resource of the 'Dream' he shows an incredibly clear panorama where we can recognize the beginnings of capitalism, in which books have gone from being considered repositories of wisdom and common sense, to becoming mere marketplace objects.