By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters’ mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audience’s aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose —Cervantes, Lope de Vega, María de Zayas and Luis Vélez de Guevara— as well as Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Córdoba.

By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters’ mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audience’s aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose —Cervantes, Lope de Vega, María de Zayas and Luis Vélez de Guevara— as well as Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Córdoba.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) brings together an international team of scholars to explore new interdisciplinary and comparative approaches for the study of colonialism. Using four overarching themes, the volume examines a wide array of critical issues, key texts, and figures that demonstrate the significance of Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across national and regional traditions and historical periods. This invaluable resource will be of interest to students and scholars of Spanish and Latin American studies examining colonial Caribbean and Latin America at the intersection of cultural and historical studies; transatlantic, postcolonial and decolonial studies; and critical approaches to archives and materiality. This timely volume assesses the impact and legacy of colonialism and coloniality.

This collection of original essays presents new ways of looking at Cervantes’ final novel. Persiles, a work that engages with geopolitical models of race, ethnicity, nation, and religion, takes its inspiration from the highly influential Ethiopian Story (the Aithiopika) of Heliodorus. With particular relevance to the period, the Persiles questions the issue of cultural pluralism in the Spanish empire and emphasizes the need to rethink the radically altered category of lo bárbaro/the barbarian (which included not only the Jew, the Muslim, and the Gypsy, but also the criollo, the mestizo, and the indiano), a new multiracial and multiethnic reality that posed a profound challenge to early modern Spain. The contributors offer a range of perspectives in spatial theory, psychology and subjectivity, visual culture, and literary theory.

Examines theater and portraiture as interrelated social practices in seventeenth-century Spain. Features visual images and cross-disciplinary readings of selected plays that employ the motif of the painted portrait to key dramatic and symbolic effect.

In a comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of modern and postmodern literature, film, art, and visual culture, Monika Kaup examines the twentieth century's recovery of the baroque within a hemispheric framework embracing North America, Latin America, and U.S. Latino/a culture. As "neobaroque" comes to the forefront of New World studies, attention to transcultural dynamics is overturning the traditional scholarship that confined the baroque to a specific period, class, and ideology in the seventeenth century. Reflecting on the rich, nonlinear genealogy of baroque expression, Neobaroque in the Americas envisions the baroque as an anti-proprietary expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists and contributes to the new studies in global modernity.

Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens. Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos—divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization. Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville’s hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.