Baroque Poet Research Articles

Between Poetry and Painting: Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara’s Metamorfosi as a Model for Genoese Baroque Poets and Painters

In a large part of recent studies on baroque iconography, the development of mythological representations and the use of classical sources during the 17th century has been considered. When referring to the sources used by baroque painters, it is quite common to speak generically about “Ovid”, and in not many cases we found precise links to one of the edited texts of the Metamorfosi, which were largely used by painters instead of the original Latin version. In the same way, the new “baroque language” used by poets is founded too on the basis of classical poems, revisited by great literates of the 16th century: especially Tasso, Ariosto, and Anguillara. The more logical way of reading the roots of the baroque culture through objects, such as books and works of art, is to understand completely the cultural landscape in which both poets and painters lived and the sources they considered to be “classical” or “antico”: a perspective that is radically different from ours. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how in Genoa, one of the greatest cities in which the new baroque culture rose, during the 17th century, the book by Anguillara was used both as a model by literates for their baroque rethorical composition and by painters as a more comprehensible and “modern” source of the “antico” for their works of art. The importance of Anguillara’s book is well demonstrated by its finding in the most important Genoese libraries of the 16th and 17th century, which have been checked in some recent publications. The great literary works by Luca Assarino and Anton Giulio Brignole Sale, and the painted myths by Orazio De Ferrari, Domenico Fiasella and Gregorio De Ferrari become, from this point of view, important examples of the communitas studiorum that was present in Genoa’s Republic all along the 17th century and that made the Ligurian city an important and today still less studied center of the European cultural update.

Góngora’s Sonnet “El Cuarto Enrico yace mal herido”

This article is an analysis of Luis de Gongora’s skillful employment of language to characterize King Henry IV of France in the funereal sonnet “El Cuarto Enrico yace mal herido.” Gongora wrote his poem in 1610 to honor Henry who was murdered in Paris in that same year by Jean-Francois Ravaillac. In the text the Spanish lyric poet creates historical, mythological, and heraldic allusions, rhetorical figures, and images of color. In particular, he is adept at forming various types of metaphors. By relating these metaphors to charges on Henry’s coats of arms as well as to accounts of the king’s personal history, Gongora paints a brilliant verbal picture of one of France’s most beloved rulers. This vibrant description of King Henry reveals that Gongora, the baroque poet, was also Gongora, the master of portraiture and expert commentator on events connected to the period in which he and the monarch lived.

Teoría y crítica literaria en Agudeza y arte de ingenio

The aim of Gracian’s Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Sharp-mindedness and the Art of Wit) was to write a treatise explaining all the different types of conceits. Being aware that concepto is a multi-purpose word, Gracian proceded to make additional definitions and distinctions, outlining some categories and subcategories of conceits, and establishing different possibilities of combination between them. His theory, based on an inductive procedure, raises some objections: 1) it is difficult to find the rules governing the faculty of wit, the technique of arte de ingenio; 2) the idea of conceit based on the relationship of similarity does not take into account the fact that many witty correspondences are devoid of literary quality; 3) the practice of conceit barely explains the most important achievements and innovations made by the great Baroque poets, at least in Spain, despite their reputation for the bold use of conceptos. In spite of those shortcomings, Agudeza y arte de ingenio deserves credit for its theoretical ambition and for Gracian’s effort to renovate the literary and gnoseological thought of his time.

«Фонарь догадки во тьме времен»: о пьесе Игнатия Ивановского «Сонеты Шекспира»

<p>Писательские фантазии переводчиков сонетов Шекспира, рожденные в процессе переводческого поиска, стали своеобразным литературным резонансом шекспировской сонетианы в России. Пьеса Игнатия Ивановского «Сонеты Шекспира» — яркий пример подобной креативной игры художественными смыслами шекспировских стихов, показавшей удивительную способность автора преобразовать его переводческое прочтение сонетов в собственную пьесу. В статье представлена попытка аналитического сопоставления переводческой позиции и переводных находок Ивановского с образами и сюжетами «Сонетов Шекспира». Статья выполнена в свете проекта, разрабатываемого Институтом мировой литературы им. А. М. Горького РАН.</p><p>Представление о Шекспире и его сонетах Ивановский изложил в статье «Совсем другой Шекспир». Автор уверен, что в шекспировском сборнике отсутствует циклообразующее единство и далеко не все написано Шекспиром. Первые 17 стихотворений, считает переводчик, появились в связи со смертью сына Шекспира, поэтому в их основе не гимн красоте, а тяжкое горе отца. Эти стихи — позднее добавление к задуманному ранее собранию сонетов, посвященных женщине. Названные принципы представлены в статье не умозрительными идеями — рожденные в творческом пространстве богатого писательского воображения Ивановского, они явились результатом проникновенного ощущения Шекспира и его стихов трепетно живыми.</p><p>Гипотетические «догадки» Ивановского стали творческими импульсами к созданию его пьесы и определили ее структуру: три интермедии, связанные обрамляющей основой. Идейно-композиционное средоточие пьесы — Шекспир и его сонеты. Интермедии последовательно приближают нас к шекспировским стихам, а персонажами третьей становятся их ожившие герои, которые действуют, подчиняясь волшебной магии шекспировской поэзии. Поэтическую магистраль произведения создают сонеты, непосредственно включенные в обрамляющую часть пьесы. Восприятие Шекспира барочным поэтом позволило Ивановскому воссоздавать семантическую наполненность шекспировских метафор и стимулировало использование их художественного потенциала в пьесе.</p><p>Проведенный анализ выявил несомненное отражение переводческих находок Ивановского в созидаемых им образах и сюжетных «догадках» пьесы о Шекспире. В свете теории метафоры, разрабатываемой в современной когнитивной филологии, такой анализ позволяет дополнять и конкретизировать представления о возможности применения когнитивных подходов в переводоведческих исследованиях.</p>

Sobre la transmissió manuscrita de l'obra poètica de Francesc Fontanella: els cançoners principals i l'ordenació dels textos

Summary: The poetic oeuvre of the baroque poet Francesc Fontanella (1622–1682/83) was widely known. We still keep thirty-seven witnesses of his work: thirty-one are manuscripts and six are printed copies. Despite the fact that his poems have been generally regarded as following a disordered arrangement, this paper proposes two nuances to this perception: on the one hand, the analysis of Fontanella’s poetry transmission allows us to define a micro organization through well defined cycles in accordance with subject, addressees, writing circumstances, etc.; on the other hand, we can classify a large number of Fontanella’s poetry through the comparison of the disposition of the poems both in his books and in the miscellaneous collections which contain a critical number of his poems. The outcome are three large sets of manuscripts. The resulting data has been supported by the comparative analysis of its rubrics. Both factors offer a guideline to understand the poetic works of the Barcelona poet and playwright and collaborate with the ecdotic analysis to build a critical edition of his poetic oeuvre. [Keywords: Francesc Fontanella; baroque poetry; modern Catalan literature; textual criticism; codicology]

Maupassant: une littérature de la provocation by Thierry Poyet

Reviews 275 traditions is marshaled clearly and appropriately to open the major intellectual and spiritual journey of Emmanuel. The results are impressive, indeed admirable. They leave little question of Emmanuel’s position as one of the major voices of twentiethcentury France. Emmanuel viewed the “crucifixion as the climactic event in human history” (26), and despite the century’s indifference to the gospels, he exploited the enormously rich possibilities of Scripture to the full. Like French baroque poets, however, his powerful images confront the central Biblical tradition with that of Greek mythology.Often heavily eroticized,he opens both short and long poems to the liturgical tradition, to the human condition, and to current events, especially during the Second World War and the occupation of his homeland. “The connections between blood and tears, or dew and flood, exemplify the tropological, or moral, level of typological symbolism” (51). Like others who have considered Emmanuel’s poetry, O’Neil senses both the influence of Freudian and Bachelardian imagery. Thoroughly at home with poems that, while lacking the narrative thread of the longer poems, fit nonetheless firmly into the poet’s world view, she leaves no doubt of her grasp of the poetry. In the process, she takes the poetics, ranging from free verse to the most traditional of alexandrines, into account.Although a poet who sees himself primarily as a storyteller, “Emmanuel loves strong imagery that enables the reader to feel Christ’s agony, or Orpheus’s plunge into the underworld, or Hölderlin’s descent into madness” (66). Emmanuel forces his readers to become intellectually engaged, using “images from contemporary culture to form conceits that make the notion of spiritual combat more relevant to the reader” (147). His poor health kept him from active military service during the war years, but both his poetic and personal involvement highlight his courage and commitment. In the midst of his apocalyptic vision, however, there shines the inevitable triumph of freedom. While Emmanuel is often difficult, as he sees a “world tottering between catastrophe and redemption” (78), O’Neil provides a sure guide. Whether images previously exploited by medieval troubadours, the French tradition,or fresh eyes confronting nature,the Bible,or contemporary history,her book makes the voyage from myth,faith,to the poet’s psyche a singular pleasure.She bases her interpretations on original texts, while providing excellent translations. Both O’Neil’s command of Emmanuel’s many volumes of poetry and the traditions from which he draws inspiration makes this a very important book, not just for those of us who read Emmanuel, but for those of us who wish a firmer grasp of twentieth-century poetry. University of Kansas Allan H. Pasco Poyet, Thierry. Maupassant: une littérature de la provocation. Paris: Kimé, 2011. ISBN 978-2-84174-573-9. Pp. 191. 20,50 a. This study recasts Maupassant’s narrative fiction in a contentious light while affirming its place within the context of fin-de-siècle unconventionality. Poyet defines Maupassant’s polemical writing as“une littérature du dévoilement”and argues that the stories provoke by peeling off the masks that hide unsavory secrets (47). He substantiates this claim by examining the manner in which the provocation manifests itself and plays out within different spheres such as sexuality, marriage, family, society, religion, politics, and literature. The section dedicated to “Maupassant et la question du sexe,” elucidates how the seeds of controversy are generated and sustained by the author’s choice to depict aberrant sexual practices:“une sexualité hors norme, marquée souvent par la violence, toujours par des attitudes inhabituelles” (37). The chapters on women and sexuality also cite Maupassant’s “acharnement misogyne” as a key factor contributing to the corrosive textual elements (49). They contend that the female protagonists are invariably motivated by money—“chez Maupassant, la femme est intéressée”—(43) and habitually figure as commodity:“une marchandise, qui a un prix” (37). Class-based mockery and social satire provide the focus for “Maupassant peintre de société,” revealing the different ways the writer pokes fun at peasants, bourgeois, and aristocrats alike. Poyet explains that while being fully aware of his bourgeois readership, the aristocratic Maupassant enjoyed vilifying...

The golden flower of youth: baroque metaphors in Nonnus and Marino

Nonnus of Panopolis’ mythological epic Dionysiaca on the god Dionysus (fifth-century CE) is often characterized as ‘baroque’. This term poses a problem: whether as a historical term referring to the European seventeenth century or as a typological category applicable to other periods of time, it is much debated. With regard to the Dionysiaca it is nearly always applied rather intuitively. To clarify its use, I propose a comparison between a passage of the Dionysiaca and a passage of the Adone by the seventeenth-century baroque poet Giambattista Marino. I shall focus on one literary device in particular: poetic metaphor, a distinctive feature of seventeenth-century baroque poetry. Following some preliminary remarks on the use of the term ‘baroque’, I present a short introduction on Nonnus and Marino and on baroque metaphor. I then offer some tools for analysis, followed by a detailed discussion of the description of two beautiful satyr boys: Nonnus’ Ampelus and Marino’s Pampino. Both poets are very fond of metaphors. Close on the conceptual level, but different in linguistic expression, their metaphors achieve a similar effect, expressing change, instability, illusion, and metamorphosis — typically baroque preoccupations. When used to analyse and compare a creative principle, the term ‘baroque’ can be a stimulus for intertextual research.

Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise Le verbe fait image: Iconoclasmes, écriture figurée et théologie de l’incarnation chez les poètes métaphysiques; le cas de George Herbert [The word made image: Iconoclasms, figurative writing, and theology of the Incarnation among the metaphysical poets; the case of George Herbert]Le verbe fait image: Iconoclasmes, écriture figurée et théologie de l’incarnation chez les poètes métaphysiques; le cas de

With this said, a “Eucharistic” reading of Herbert is less novel than Miller-Blaise sometimes intimates. For all the book’s generous, often acute engagement with Herbert criticism, one regrets the absence of any debate with Regina Schwartz’s important Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford University Press, 2008); alternately, missing is a more sustained account of why Rosemond Tuve’s A Reading of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 1952) does not pave the way for its arguments. Still, the manner in which this book makes the case for Herbert as a Baroque poet who would find “accommodation” as well as the “conversion of the muse” (207, 231) deserves true praise. Like Robert Ellrodt’s seminal study of English metaphysical poetry, L’inspiration personelle et l’esprit du temps chez les poètes métaphysiques anglais (Paris: Corti, 1960)—a study often cited here—Le verbe fait image profits from a Continental perspective to construct a broad, syncretic intellectual frame for late English Renaissance poetry. But, alternately, like Richard Strier’s account of Herbert’s achievement in Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1983), Miller-Blaise’s study is also a “hedgehog” (xii), fueled by a single idea or conceit, albeit one marvelously uniting multiple, often contradictory kinds of meaning and expression.

“Ave (aunque muda yo)”: The Image of the Nightingale in Góngora's Love Sonnets

The nightingale is one of the most metatextual symbols in poetry, but its meaning varies considerably from one context to another. In the works of some poets, the bird is a figure of orality, a symbol of virtuosity in singing. In others, however, it is a metaphor for writing. In classical mythology, the nightingale is the metamorphosis of Philomela, who after being raped and having her tongue cut out by Tereus, reveals what has happened to her by weaving a tapestry with images of Tereus's transgression. The bird is thus associated with silent signs that resemble those of a text. This essay examines the representation of the nightingale in three sonnets by the Baroque poet Luis de Góngora, and contrasts his use of the image with that of Garcilaso de la Vega. Whereas Garcilaso represents the nightingale as an ideal of perfect singing and as a natural analogue of the poet, Góngora emphasizes its writerly nature and creates a more complicated relationship between the lyric voice and the bird.

The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics

The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics

La distancia y la modestia: las "dos" caras del Atlántico en los versos de Sor Juana a la duquesa de Aveyro

This essay examines an under explored side of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's "Romance 37": her Creole subjectivity in the representation of space in the transatlantic literature of New Spain. I argue that this seventeenth-century nun uses her praise of Duchess of Aveyro, another intellectual and virtuous woman from Portugal, to advance a protest. By using admiration as the apparent motive of the endeavor, she elaborates a strong criticism of colonialism and the role the Atlantic plays in its consolidation. As she denounces how Europe bleeds dry the mines of Mexico, she presents the Atlantic as a space of economic exchange and historical exploitation, i.e., a gateway to inequity. However, as a baroque poet, her depiction of the Atlantic invites another consideration, that of "cultural" exchanges and tolerance, which she fashions through equality, the antithesis of subordination that this space epitomizes after 1492. As she modestly appears to praise virtue in a transatlantic figure who presents what she recognizes in herself, Sor Juana aligns America and her poetry with Neo-Thomism in order to pair center with periphery and re-locate reason in America. I demonstrate that this strategy accommodates a Creole subjectivity that fights difference and oppression. In the latter symbolism, another "facet" of the Atlantic reveals itself. By taking the poetic form of the "romance" in an original direction, as it crosses the Atlantic to and from the periphery of the Old World, she advances a Creole sentiment via the symbolic re-evaluation of the Atlantic as instrument of empire.

Tears in the Desert: Baroque Adaptations of the Book of Lamentations by John Donne and Francisco de Quevedo

Scholars have for decades compared many aspects of the poetry of two contemporaneous Baroque poets, John Donne (1572–1631) and Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1640). But, oddly, no one has compared their almost simultaneous adaptations of the Old Testament Book of Lamentations. Why would both poets independently, but writing at almost exactly the same time, choose this biblical text for poetic adaptation? What was it about the Book of Lamentations that resonated so poignantly with their particular historical moment? This study focuses not on questions of political or personal crisis, nor on affirmations of religious orthodoxy. Instead, it concentrates on a shared spiritual formation involving Jesuit meditational techniques. Jesuit meditational practice relied on sensorial imagery, and this type of acute sensorial experience is found in both Donne's and Quevedo's reworkings of Lamentations.

Katherine Philips traductora de Saint-Amant y Corneille

Trabajo que trata sobre una de las primeras mujeres autoras inglesa de renombre, Katherine Philips, conocida en su círculo literario como “la incomparable Orinda”, que, además de su faceta de poeta llegó a gozar de fama literaria como traductora de dos escritores franceses: el poeta barroco Saint-Amant y el dramaturgo creador de la denominada tragedia psicológica en Francia: Pierre Corneille.

Crashaw and Abjection: Reading the Unthinkable in His Devotional Verse

Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1980) offers a compelling framework for reading the seventeenth-century baroque poet, Richard Crashaw. Kristeva understands abjection as the horror resulting from the collapse of the psychic borders between what is clean and unclean, inside and outside the control of the body. Both writers draw inspiration from the devotional practices of late medieval women mystics. But whereas Kristeva focuses on the semiotic communication between the preoedipal mother and child, Crashaw's engagement with the language of feminine piety had its source in the library of his Protestant father, William Crashaw, who collected the Catholic literature he would denounce from the pulpit. Abjection was the psychic mechanism that allowed Richard Crashaw to break down his father's distinction between the "clean" Protestant self and the loathed Catholic other still attached, like the Christ child, to the maternal breast of Mary. In the divine epigram, "Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked," Crashaw conflates religion and sex, the sacred and the somatic, through abject images of milk, saliva, blood, semen and their bodily sources—mouth, breast, genitals, and anus—to say yes to the unthinkable.

Dänisch-deutsche Doppelgänger: Transnationale und bikulturelle Literatur zwischen Barock und Moderne ed. by Heinrich Detering et al

MLRy 98,2,2003 531 farthe most space, are perhaps the most useful forteaching purposes. Each comes with a list of further reading, generally thoughtfully compiled, though one could venture to say here that English-language sources could more often have been given priority. Compilers of the entries have evidently been allowed to write in their own style and follow their own individual approach, a policy which sometimes results in obscurity, but which means, arguably, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One can of course argue with the choice of authors and individual literary works. For Thomas Mann, we get The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Doctor Faustus, and Tonio Kroger, but strangely no Buddenbrooks; Hans Magnus Enzensberger has apparently never written a classic, but Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek both have two each. There are unfortunate omissions too. From the 1960s and 1970s no Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and no Bernward Vesper, no 'Terrorism' or '1968' either (and no Ulrike Meinhof). Yet the selection is politically motivated for all that. There is an emphasis on women. Thus Caroline and Dorothea Schlegel come in between the more famous brothers and Marianne Ehrmann's Amalie is given its due as 'the first theater fiction written by a woman'. The choices in this respect appear judicious and one certainly cannot say that the men have been squeezed out to make room. It is when we come to German writing by authors of non-German origin, an expanding area of scholarly enquiry for the last decade or more, that editorial decisions become more contentious and ideologically driven. Only time will tell whether these will date more quickly than the rest, but taken as a whole the Encyclopedia is surely destined to become an indispensable research and reference tool. University of Kent Julian Preece Ddnisch-deutsche Doppelgdnger: Transnationale und bikulturelle Literatur zwischen Barock und Moderne. Ed. by Heinrich Detering, Anne-Bitt Gerecke, and Johan de Mylius. (Grenzgange: Studien zur skandinavisch-deutschen Literaturgeschichte , 3) Gottingen: Wallstein. 2001. 240 pp. ?20. ISBN 3-89244356 -4 (pbk). Traditionally, the concepts of nation and national culture have provided the basis for criticism of modern literature as a medium for the negotiation of collective iden? tity.In recent years, the emphasis has increasingly shifted towards the phenomena of transculturality, hybridity,and the 'space between' cultures, literatures, and identities. In the process particular attention has been given to authors who, because of their biography, are already located between differentlanguages and cultures, participating in and mediating between both. The book under discussion deals with a variety of such authors forwhom the bicultural and bilingual status is central to their position as 'Grenzganger'. Most of them lived and wrote on both sides of linguistic, geographical, and political borders and often quite consciously regarded themselves as mediators between them. The bor? ders in question are those between Denmark and Germany, and between Danish and German languages and cultures. Throughout the centuries the political borders and cultural-linguistic demarcation lines underwent frequent and considerable changes, and the political and the cultural dimensions did not always coincide. The regional and historical diversity of the figures treated in this collection of essays reflects this fact. The time-span covered in this book is considerable: it starts with an article on the Baroque poet Zacharias Lund (1608-7l) and concludes with a number of authors who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Herman Bang (1857-1912) and Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-85). In their foreword the editors point out that the contributions to the volume look at different models of transnational transfer and 532 Reviews mediation which grew out of a political and cultural development increasingly characterized by concepts of nation and nationhood. The confrontation of the idea of a national literature characterized by specific traits and animosities with a more cosmopolitan , transnational, and transcultural outlook dominates the work of many of the authors under discussion, and it also influences the place they are assigned in literary history at any given time. Of the twelve contributions to the volume, which is based on a symposium held in Kiel in 1998, eleven deal with individual authors, while the last article...

The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater by Amalia Gladhart (review)

1012 Reviews not to be found in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Salgado reveals the importance of Damaso Alonso's 1926 translation of A Portrait (El artista adolescente : Retrato (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva)), a translation he shows was very much informed by the poetic language of Gongora, the Spanish Baroque poet central to the 1927 Generation's revaloration of Baroque poetics. Thus, as Salgado perspicuously explains, the Baroque revival is 'intimately connected with the assimilation of a European aesthetic' (p. 81), i.e. Modernism, and Alonso's text becomes a nexus linking Joyce's European Modernism and Lezama's Caribbean neobaroque. Incidentally, this section of the book seems to me to suggest the need for a full-length study of the language of Alonso's translation of Joyce's work, exploring its correspondences with Baroque rhetoric. Salgado's concluding analysis of the uncanny similarities between the polemic occasioned by attempts to produce 'corrected' versions of Ulysses and Paradiso and the perceived need to produce such versions is an absorbing and appropriate ending which furtherillustrates the close relationship of Joyce's and Lezama's work through displaced symptoms of the Freudian kind. My only criticisms ofthe book are minor ones, and concern the publisher ratherthan the author. The index is but an index of names, while the last chapter is, ironically, slightly marred by a greater number of typographic and orthographic errors than in previous ones (although these are to be found throughout the book, especially in Spanish quotations or in the inconsistent rendering of original German terms such as Bildungsroman or Walpurgisnacht). However, the errors are not so frequent that the reader of Salgado's book, like some readers of Joyce's and Lezama's novels discussed in this last chapter, would be tempted to establish 'a link between textual errancy and the author's moral corruption' (p. 194). Far from this, Salgado's book is a lucid account which displays considerable virtues in its detailed documentation and handling of complex texts, ideas, and issues. University of Stirling Alexis Grohmann The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater . By Amalia Gladhart. (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Department of Modern Languages. 2000. 245 pp. $34-95The book sets out to be a study of contemporary Latin American theatre, focusing on the interaction of the plays and their audiences. The strongest point ofthe volume is the introduction, which presents an in-depth analysis of the theory of performance, supported by an impressive overview of the existing body of research on the subject. Such an approach appeals both to specialists in Latin American theatre studies and to researchers in other fields of Latin American culture, as it offers an analysis of a wide range of plays with a solid theoretical back-up, which is intended to inform the underlying argument of the whole work. The book often favours less researched works, stepping away from popular names in Latin American theatre, such as Rodolfo Usigli and Carlos Fuentes. This has advantages and disadvantages. While the choice of works gives the less researched playwrights the attention they deserve, in several chapters the absence of the connection with the body of mainstream writing creates the impression that this has had little or no effect on the later pieces. Moreover, Gladhart's decision is not put consistently into effectthroughout the volume. In the firstcomparative analysis of historical plays she is faithfulto the strategy, studying the works of Vicente Lenero, Jose Antonio Rial, Sabina Berman, and Miguel Sabido. However, the focal point of MLR, 97.4, 2002 1013 the chapter, which is the multiple interpretations of a historical event, immediately evokes Usigli's renowned El gesticulador, which remains unexplored. A deeper, more complex meaning ofthe multiplicity of 'truth' is thereforeabandoned in favour ofsupporting , often superficially, the idea of 'coercive performance'. A short and succinct overview of the tradition of Latin American historical plays and semi-documentary testimonioswould have offered a wider intertextual background, against which the study of less well-known plays would have appeared contextually logical. Instead, the existing seven-line nod to the mainstream historical plays gives...

"El Sueno: The Baroque Imagination and the Dreamscape"

The maximization of the spatial dimension figures among the fundamental organizational principles in Sor Juana's poem, El sueno.1 Her masterful blending of language and aerial imagery has produced a poetic text which transcends the boundaries of time and space through the establishment of relationships-horizontal and vertical-among distinct spatiotemporal realities, and surmounts the temporal barrier of sequence inherent in the literary act through the techniques of juxtaposition and simultaneity. More than a geometry of universal experience, this composition of the Latin American Baroque is a lyric, oneiric topology of psychic expanses and privileged moments, a fantastic landscape which reveals the dynamic quality of Sor Juana's time consciousness, and where time and space become the vehicles of freedom and flight. The principal coordinates of Sor Juana's art are spatial forms and their interrelationships. Yet there is in the poetic text of Sor Juana a new conception and treatment of the poematic space that is distinct from that of her predecessors. Whereas the baroque poet seeks to exalt and transform reality, often replacing it with an elaborate ideality, Sor Juana's objective in El Sueno is to transgress the material world, etherealize it, internalize it,

Effigies et Poesis. An Illustrated Catalogue of Printed Portraits with Laudatory Verses by German Baroque Poets

Effigies et Poesis. An Illustrated Catalogue of Printed Portraits with Laudatory Verses by German Baroque Poets

The Spanish World

Book Reviews239 Margaret George. Women in the First Capitalist Society: Experiences in Seventeenth-Century England. Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1988. 261 p. Gwenn Davis and Beverly A. Joyce. Personal Writings by Women to 1900: A Bibliography of American and British Writers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989. 294 p. A history of those intimate surveys of daily life, the diaries, is the subject of Centuries ofFemale Days. Reviewing nearly one hundred women's private accounts from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, Harriet Blodgett offers a chance for comparison of attitudes toward marriage, motherhood, and work. The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century women include Diana Astry, Anne Clifford, Mary Clavering Cowper, Elizabeth Freke, Margaret Hoby, Katherine Howard, and Isabella Twysden. Anne Clifford's diary entries from 1676, not included in Sackville-West's The Diary ofAnne Clifford, are reprinted. With an eye turned to the newly emerging bourgeoisie, Margaret George's Women in the First Capitalist Society examines seventeenth-century Englishwomen through their personal literature. The Puritan Lucy Hutchinson and the Catholic Elizabeth Cellier along with Elizabeth Freke, Alice Thornton, and Brilliana Harley all have self-contained chapters drawn from information in their own diaries, letters, and autobiographies. Additional sections discuss radical Protestantism and attitudes toward sex. Personal Writings by Women to 1900, compiled by Gwenn Davis and Beverly A. Joyce, is a bibliography recording the private world—letters, diaries, autobiographies , and some advice books such as The Countess ofLincoln's Nursery (1622). To comment on the seventeenth-century entries only: the greatest problem I find with this project is the cut-offdate, for no books appearing after 1900 are included. This eliminates such publications as the diaries ofAnne Clifford (1923) and Margaret Hoby (1930), along with the letters of Katherine Paston (1941), Dorothy Wadham (1904), Maria van Rensselaer (1935), and many others. A number of corrupt texts which were published before 1900 have been superseded by twentieth-century editions; however, the post-1900 versions are not listed. Personal Writings cites the earlier memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett (1875), and Ann, Lady Fanshaw (1829), but excludes the excellent John Loftis edition of these two autobiographies (1979). And, some works published before 1900 are missing, for example the letters of Margaret and John Winthrop (1893) and of Dorothy, Countess of Sunderland (1819 and 1843). Personal Writings is worth taking the time to check, but should not be considered the place for a full stop. THE SPANISH WORLD Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. 450 p. Octavio Paz. Sor Juana or, The Traps ofFaith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 547 p. 240Rocky Mountain Review A Sor Juana Anthology, translated by Alan S. Trueblood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 248 p. "In their convents, women both withdrew from society and triumphed over it," write Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau in Untold Sisters. Spanish Sisters, from Old and New Spain in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, it now turns out, left behind extensive archival sources—poems, autobiographies, letters . Here is to be found biographical data, bilingual selections of literature, a rich gallery of pictures including self-portraits, and all assembled to uncover an eloquent voice in a heretofore unknown literature. Only two of these religious women are well known, Saint Teresa and Juana de la Cruz. We learn of others in convents from Spain to Peru and Mexico. Untold Sisters contains an excellent bibliography of the seventeenth-century Spanish world. It is somehow fitting that Mexico's leading twentieth-century scholar should write a biography of Mexico's great seventeenth-century intellectual. Octavio Paz, with his critically acclaimed Sor Juana, has finally opened the life of Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz to the English world. As linguist, scientist, playwright, feminist, and leading baroque poet, the nun ofMexico was the only Renaissance intellectual of the Americas in her century. As Paz notes, Sor Juana was "a creature of words who lived for and because of the word" (197). A superb companion to the Paz biography is A Sor Juana Anthology, a bilingual selection ofpoetry, including the classic "First Dream," with excellent translations by Alan S. Trueblood. As noted in the introduction...

Reading a painting by Elstir: fanciful descriptions in Proust and some Baroque poets

Reading a painting by Elstir: fanciful descriptions in Proust and some Baroque poets