The appearance of Edward Said’s On Late Style (2006) meant a clear revival of the nineteenth-century concept of late style (Spätstil), that is, a peculiar aesthetic position taken by some artists at the end of their careers, when they become acutely aware of their own mortality and of the passage of time, and develop a self-reflective, time-conscious style. This idea, much developed by the likes of Theodor Adorno, was originally applied to music, and in particular to the works of Beethoven (in particular, his late quartets), but the popularity of Said and the simplicity of his proposal (as opposed to Adorno’s) meant that reflections on late style have proliferated in our century. Thus, and to give but a few examples, we may find books on late style in Shakespeare (McDonald, 2010) and Goethey (Sina, 2020), Debussy (Wheeldon, 2009) and Schumann (Turnbridge, 2009), among many other artists in literature, music, and painting.

Spanish Golden Age studies have followed suit, and critics have dedicated quite a few works to two of the period’s most prolific and long-lived authors: Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Concerning the first, we have important contributions by Grilli (2016) and Vila (2019), who try to establish a corpus and focus mostly on Cervantes’ last and posthumous Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. These critics depart from Said, and wrestle with the problem of the corpus (most of Cervantes’ work was produced in his old age, but it remains to be seen whether that means that all he wrote was determined by late style), to which Ruiz Pérez (2021) adds the Viaje del Parnaso, which he analyzes from the point of view of Rozas (1990), whose ideas of Lope and de senectute have been very influential in Lope de Vega studies, as critics (Profeti, 1997) have mostly accepted Rozas’s biographical approach to interpret Lope’s stylistic evolution. Thus, while most Cervantes experts use Said’s ideas, these remain far from Lope specialists, who use, rather, Rozas’ proposal, which derives directly from Cicero (and Ficino), without apparently passing by nineteenth-century German scholarship, and which remains a biographical reading of literary texts.

In this context, our project aims to provide a critical review of ideas on late style, both in general and particularly applied to Golden Age Spanish literature. We wish to point out the inconsistencies in applying late style ideas, and to discuss recent criticism of the concept. That is, in the first place, we propose a detailed and critical state of the art article which completes the ideas of Zerari-Penin (2014), not only to include important works such as Grilli’s (2016), Vila’s (2019), or Ruiz Pérez’s (2021), but, mostly, to consider the weaknesses of the concept, as discussed by Hutcheon and Hutcheon (2012), McMullen and Smiles (2016), and McMullen (2019). In short, we propose producing an extensive critical review of late style secondary literature, as well as a clarification and redefinition of late style using philosophical theories on time perception, in particular Agamben’s (2006), and contrasting them to Golden Age ideas on the ages of man.

We have both reflected on late style in our own work, Gerber, related to Cervantes (2018); Sánchez Jiménez, to Lope de Vega (2018; 2022), and we are developing a theory on self-consciously digressive style in these two authors that will also relate to late style. Therefore, the topic is important for our own research, and essential to many scholars who wish to apply a very popular idea to Golden Age Spanish studies.