A noteworthy feature of much Golden Age Spanish literature is its expressions of authorial self-consciousness. Writers of the period display a sharpened awareness of composition techniques and textual dissemination, of circulation patterns and readership — an awareness often incorporated into their texts through plots, tropes and other devices. Among such devices, metaphorical representations of texts and textual production offer particularly sophisticated expressions of how authors understood their craft, their product and their audience.

In the prologue to his Novelas ejemplares [Exemplary Novels], for example, Cervantes famously likens the collection to a ‘mesa de trucos’, a type of Italian billiard table then in vogue for public recreation. The playful figure, as Cervantes develops it, embodies a recognition of the simultaneously subjective and communal nature of reading at a time when popular reading habits still included reading aloud to an audience of friends, family members or fellow-labourers.

A self-reflective figure could also illustrate its author's method. A generation after Cervantes, the courtier Juan de Andosilla finds the image of centones or patchwork garments to be useful for representing the design and nature of his piecemeal reworkings of Garcilaso de la Vega's poetry. By this sort of figurative application, the term centón came to designate a specific sub-genre: a pastiche or literary amalgam composed entirely of fragments from earlier works in such a way that the fragments take on meanings different from those of the original sources.

And even when using a metaphorical commonplace, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz imaginatively elaborates a text-as-progeny topos to suit her unique purposes. Her dedicatory sonnet to the Countess of Paredes in her Inundación Castálida [Inundation of the Muses] (1689) depicts her poems as children born to an ‘esclava madre’ [enslaved mother] who, by law, must surrender possession of her offspring to her mistress. Sor Juana's metaphor at once conveys the poet’s singular relationship to her patroness, suggests the intensely and intimately personal nature of the poems, and hints, we might imagine, at a sense of reluctant obligation in relinquishing them to her readership.

Billiard tables, patchwork clothes, indentured children: all three figures illuminate contemporary concepts of the creative impulse, the writing process and the authors’ self-conceived role in relation to their texts and readers.