Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes

Description

Traditional Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigms of love started to show clear signs of inadequacy and exhaustion in the sixteenth century. How did the Spanish Golden Age recast worn out discourses of love and make them compelling again? This volume explores how Spanish letters recognized that old love paradigms, especially the crisis of the subject, presented an extraordinary opportunity for revising traditional literary strictures. As a result, during Spain's nascent modernity, literature took up the challenge to expand existing forms of desire and subjectivity. A range of scholars show how canonical and non-canonical Golden Age writers like Miguel de Cervantes, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Gongora, Lope de Vega, and Francisco de la Torre y Sevil became equal agents of the sweeping ontological reconfiguration of the idea of eros that defined their culture. Such reconfiguration includes: the troubling displacement of "self" and "other" seen in sentimental genres like the pastoral or romance; the overlapping of emotions such as love and jealousy characteristic of the baroque lyric and dramatic production; and the conflation of axioms such as eros and eris prevalent in contemporaneous epic experiments. In uniting the findings of often surprising texts, the collection of essays in Goodbye Eros takes a pioneering look at how Golden Age moral, ideological, scientific, and literary discourses intersected to create fascinating re-elaborations of the trope of love. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Eros in the Age of Cervantes 3john beusterien and ana maría laguna Part I: Ambiguous Optics: Reframing Perception, Gender Subjectivity, and Genre Convention 1 Egocentricity versus Persuasion: Eros, Logos, and Pathos in Cervantes’s Marcela and Grisóstomo Episode • Joan Cammarata and Ana María Laguna 2 The Deceived Gaze: Visual Fantasy, Art, and Feminine Adultery in Cervantes’s Reading of Ariosto • Mercedes Alcalá Galán Part II: Reasoning the Unreasonable: Toward a Rationale of Love 3 El Greco’s and Cervantes’s Euclidean Theologies • Eric Clifford Graf 4 Love and the Laws of Literature: The Ethics and Poetics of Affect in Cervantes’s “The Little Gypsy Girl” • Eli Cohen 5 Eros and Ethos in the Political and Religious Logos of The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda: Anomic Characters in Cervantes • Jesús Maestro Part III: Kissing between the Lines: Blurring Racial and Sexual Norms 6 Sexy Beasts: Women and Lapdogs in Baroque Satirical Verse • Adrienne L. Martín 7 Sexual Deviance and Morisco Marginality in Cervantes’s The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda • Christina Lee 8 The Black Madonna Icon: Race, Rape, and the Virgin of Montserrat in The Confession with the Devil by Francisco de Torre y Sevil • John Beusterien Part IV: Recasting Epic and Heroic Moulds 9 For Love of the White Sea: The Curious Identity of Uludj Ali • Diana de Armas Wilson 10 Writing a Tragic Image: Eros and Eris in Lope de Vega’s Jerusalem Conquered • Jason McCloskey 11 The Unromantic Approach to Don Quixote: Cervantine Love in the Spanish Post-War Age • Ana María Laguna Contributors Index