Antonio de la Iglesia e a difusión da literatura galega en 1856: un proxecto de antoloxía literaria

Abstract

The De la Iglesia’s brothers’ personal collection is stored in the Archive at the Real Academia Galega. Among the materials, there are 36 letters from 1856-1857 that deal with Antonio de la Iglesia’s project to write an anthology on Galician authors. Even though this project was not successfully completed, it is an obvious precedent of the anthology that he did publish in 1862 in the Álbum de la Caridad. But these documents not only bring us closer to the first seed of his work as an anthologist, but this epistolary exchange also allows us to observe how Galician literature was being diffused in a time in which there only existed a small bundle of publications, and also allows us to imagine what steps were being taken around the emergence of the full Rexurdimento, which would start in 1863 with the Cantares by Rosalia de Castro. Nonetheless, these documents demonstrate that, in spite of the lack of informational sources and editorial resources at that time, a group of intellectuals was exchanging information and texts in Galician by different authors and from quite diverse provenance, and that these texts, if not published, were at least manuscripts. In this way, others could learn about and read texts, like Alfonso X’s medieval cantigas, and, especially, Sarmiento’s coplas, that were still unpublished.