Suñeto vs Soneto: Poesía Colonial y El Periquillo Sarniento

In this essay, I aim to study the role of poetry in the novel El Periquillo Sarniento by José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi. I am interested in exploring how the few poems included in the book relate to colonial poetic practices and how these practices can be understood vis-à-vis what has been frequently regarded as the first Latin American novel. Thus I take on Adorno's ideas about the social function of poetry and on New Lyric Studies to propose that depictions of poetry in El Periquillo challenge traditional notions of literary history such as periodization and, rather, shed light on a superposition of practices that ultimately encompass both the narrative elements that make the book a modern novel and colonial literary practices. Finally, I analyze how Fernández de Lizardi, a poet himself, builds on colonial poetics in order to suggest a new genealogy that sets the production and circulation of poetry within a tension between the popular and the well-educated realms, a twofold context common to the picaresque.