This book aims at making a contribution to the approach to a discursive set that, until now, has been scarcely attended in literary studies: the essayistic autopoetics. We refer particularly to those texts, of various formats, in which artists reflect on their own aesthetic work and the artistic ideology that sustains it. We consider that these texts are unavoidable for the analysis of a writer’s work not so much because of the expression of their aesthetic postulates, but rather mainly because of the operation of self-configuration, of representation that they carry out. The resulting image, the mask that the author builds for himself, is functional both to his writing program and to the position he occupies or intends to occupy in the artistic and intellectual field, and has a direct impact on the reception, interpretation and circulation of his work.