Frederick A. De Armas

Mary E. Barnard

These essays examine a variety of cultural objects described or alluded to in books from the Golden Age of Spanish literature, including clothing, paintings, tapestries, playing cards, monuments, materials of war, and even enchanted bronze heads.

Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain

Quixotic Frescoes delves into the politics of imitation, self-censorship, religious ideology expressed through the pictorial, as well as the gendering of art as reflected in Cervantes' work.

Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art

Quixotic Frescoes

The fictional Don Quixote was constantly defeated in his knightly adventures. In writing Quixote's story, however, Miguel Cervantes succeeded in a different kind of quest — the creation of a modern novel that 'conquers' and assimilates countless literary genres. Don Quixote among the Saracens considers how Cervantes's work reflects the clash of civilizations and anxieties towards cultural pluralism that permeated Golden Age Spain. Frederick A. de Armas unravels an essential mystery of one of world literature's best known figures: why Quixote sets out to revive knight errantry, and why he comes to feel at home only among the Moorish 'Saracens,' a people whom Quixote feared at the beginning of the novel. De Armas also reveals Quixote's inner conflicts as both a Christian who vows to battle the infidel, but also a secret Saracen sympathizer. While delving into genre theory, Don Quixote among the Saracens adds a new dimension to our understandings of Spain's multicultural history.

A Clash of Civilizations and Literary Genres

Don Quixote Among the Saracens

Calderon de la Barca's La vida es sueno (1636) has proven to be more popular than any of Shakespeare's plays in a number of European countries during the last three centuries. This book is an attempt to capture the openness in contemporary scholarly discourse.

Perceptions of La Vida Es Sueño

The Prince in the Tower

This collection of essays grew out of a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute directed by Frederick A. de Armas and contains essays by the director, some of the visiting faculty, and the participants. The book seeks to develop the link between mythology and the comedia through a number of approaches, including astrology, cartomancy, pre-Socratic elemental cosmology, iconography, hagiography, metamorphoses, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jungian principles, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Santayana's poetics, syncretism, gender studies, and Vedic theories.

Myth and the Spanish Comedia

A Star-crossed Golden Age

The Roman poet Ovid, author of the famous Metamorphoses, is widely considered one of the canonical poets of Latin antiquity. Vastly popular in Europe during the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, Ovid's writings influenced the literature, art, and culture in Spain's Golden Age. The book begins with examinations of the translation and utilization of Ovid's texts from the Middle Ages to the Age of Cervantes. The work includes a section devoted to the influence of Ovid on Cervantes, arguing that Don Quixote is a deeply Ovidian text, drawing upon many classical myths and themes. The contributors then turn to specific myths in Ovid as they were absorbed and transformed by different writers, including that of Echo and Narcissus in Garcilaso de la Vega and Hermaphroditus in Covarrubias and Moya. The final section of the book centers on questions of poetic fame and self-fashioning. Ovid in the Age of Cervantes is an important and comprehensive re-evaluation of Ovid's impact on Renaissance and Early Modern Spain.

Ovid in the Age of Cervantes

David Martin Gitlitz

José A. Madrigal

Critical Perspectives on Calderón de la Barca

"Heavenly bodies is the first book in English dedicated to an analysis of La estrella de Sevilla (The Star of Seville) since the 1930s when Sturgis A. Leavitt set out to prove that this Spanish Golden Age play was written by Andres de Claramonte. In this reevaluation of La estrella de Sevilla, the question of authorship is once again discussed, but it is not the main focus of this collection of essays. The eighteen essayists in this book set out to reexamine the play in order to understand the fascination that this puzzling and problematic work has exerted over critics, theatergoers, and readers over the last three and a half centuries." "Throughout La estrella de Sevilla, its eponymous heroine serves as an object of other characters' perceptions, constructions, and manipulations. King Sancho, his advisor Don Arias, Sancho Ortiz, and even Estrella's brother Busto Tabera repeatedly define her from their own perspectives and on their own terms. In her material aspect, Estrella is Sancho's subject, a human inhabitant of Castile. Celestially speaking, the King first identifies Estrella with Saturn, then later in the play refers to her instead as a fixed star. Thus, in the eyes of those who attempt to define her, Estrella Tabera occupies multiple realms: she partakes of generation and corruption in the sublunary spheres, but at the same time she is assigned to both the seventh and eight ptolemaic spheres." "The contributors to this volume both perceive and fashion multiple contexts for La estrella de Sevilla, echoing the multiplicity of realms in which she abides within the text. The essays range from studies of how the play was performed to analyses of specific figures and themes. The many approaches utilized, including theories by Derrida, Foucault, Iser, Kermode, Lacan, Ong, and Said, serve to point to the richness and complexity of this comedia from the Spanish Golden Age."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Frederick A. De Armas

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