El destierro en la lírica española aurisecular

This dissertation offers a hermeneutic investigation of banishment (destierro) as both a literary theme and a critical category in Spanish Golden Age lyric poetry, within a chronological framework spanning from the early Renaissance to the Late Baroque (1532–1672). While banishment has often received fragmented attention in Golden Age studies—frequently subordinated to other interpretive paradigms or overshadowed by research on modern political exile—this study aims to provide a systematic critical reading of the phenomenon within the specific domain of poetic discourse. Adopting a sub specie litterarum perspective, the thesis combines theoretical reflection, thematic criticism, and textual hermeneutics. The first part establishes the analytical framework of banishment by examining its juridical, political, symbolic, and affective dimensions, as well as its terminological distinction from other forms of displacement. The second part focuses on the analysis of recurring literary motifs through which banishment is thematized in Golden Age lyric poetry, following a specular organizational principle that highlights symbolic tensions of solar and cosmic signification. The study demonstrates that banishment is not primarily measured in spatial terms, but rather through an inner depth associated with the loss of solum as a vital principle of belonging. Frequently figured as morbus, inopia, or mortis imago, banishment entails dispossession, ignominy, and spiritual aridity; yet it can also be reconfigured ethically as a space of retreat, endurance, or virtue. In this sense, banishment emerges as a mechanism of lyrical self-fashioning, through which the poetic subject constructs identity from absence without being reduced to silence or marginality. Overall, the dissertation argues that banishment functions as a form of poetic knowledge and as a privileged lens through which to examine the construction of subjectivity in early modern Spain, at the intersection of classical tradition, political and civic tensions, and strategies of literary self-representation.