Abstract: The formation of the Spanish nation and empire reverberates in its 16 th- and 17th-century literature, as the so-called 'Reconquest' of the Iberian Peninsula by the Northern, Christian kingdoms (8th-15 th centuries) served to create both new national territory and also an identifying myth. The completion of Reconquest under the Catholic monarchs Isabel and Fernando provides us with a particularly early example of national identity creation in the Early Modern era. The nascent Spanish nation was aware of and marred by the loss of its tri-cultural history, as Spain attempted to redefine itself after such a long, if pugnacious, history of religious coexistence. This project focuses on the role of the 'Moor' in imaginative and musical literature at the very moment when the Muslim and morisco populations were being persecuted and finally expelled from Spain. Cultural forces relied on the 'Moor' for the construction of a new national identity based on a nostalgia for the time prior to the Reconquest as evidenced in the continuous use of ballads such as 'Romance de la Moriana,' 'Passeávase el rey moro,' 'A las armas, Moriscote,' and 'De Antequera sale un moro.' In the texts examined (the ballads of the vihuela book repertoire; the Moorish novel, El Abencerraje; 'The Captives Tale' and the Ana Felix and Sansón Carrasco episodes of Don Quijote), particular genres or generic modes register the tension between the newly hegemonic, Christian identity and the Moorish and morisco Other. Spain's obsession with purity of blood throughout the Early Modern era caused a new focus on subjectivity, a fact important to literary scholars who have long held that questions of identity are connected to the rise of the novel genre. Contemporary theoretical discourses of genre studies and post-colonial theories of identity suggest that the novel rises in Spain owing not to the hybridity of a heterogeneous empire, as some theories of the novel have it, but to the cultural vacuum created by the expulsion of the Muslim population.