Mercedes Blanco is professor of Spanish Literature at the Sorbonne. She has written more than a hundred studies and essays on Golden Age literature, especially Gracián, Quevedo, and Góngora, in which she deals with aesthetic and formal questions, combining the task of unravelling details of the text with an examination of wide-ranging theory and historical contexts. Prominent among them are Les rhétoriques de la pointe. Baltasar Gracián et le conceptisme en Europe (1992), and the recent Góngora o la invención de una lengua (2012).