- Introduction by Emilie L. Bergmann

Description:
The articles in this collection represent more than half a century’s exploration of literary texts and the social history of language by an extraordinary scholar. Throughout his career, still remarkably productive long after retirement, Elias L. Rivers has addressed the work of the greatest authors of Spain’s cultural Golden Age: Garcilaso de la Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, Luis de Gongora y Argote, Francisco de Quevedo, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Since these are also some of the language’s most diffi cult authors, Elias’s lucidly written interpretations of renaissance and baroque stylistic labyrinths have become recognized as classics whose usefulness continues to grow over the years since their fi rst publication. Like Elias’s best graduate seminars [...] they present the broad sweep of literary history from classical antiquity to Petrarchist poetics and Derrida’s theorizing of writing and speech, tuning the reader’s ear to resonances of classical and Italian texts in the poetic production of early modern Spain, in a distinctly contemporary key.

Elias’s profound interest in sociolinguistics lends immediacy to the voices of poets who wrote for elite audiences in imperial Rome and Castile. His perspective is particularly eff ective for teaching heritage speakers who have learned about diglossia from personal experience, becoming skilled in an offi cial, written language while speaking a ‘mother’ tongue at home. - from the introduction


Table of Contents:

Preface......9

Introduction, Emilie L. Bergmann........11

Problems of Genre in Golden Age Poetry......... 19

The Horatian Epistle and its Introduction into Spanish Literature....... 37

Interplay of Syntax and Metrics in Garcilaso’s Sonnets......... 61

The Pastoral Paradox of Natural Art......... 83

Nature, Art and Science in Spanish Poetry of the Renaissance..........103

Some Ideas about Language and Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Spain......... 121

Talking And Writing In Don Quixote........ 131

Cervantes’ Art of the Prologue..........147

Cervantes and the Question of Language........155

On the Prefatory Pages of Don Quixote, Part II.......... 169

Genres and Voices in the Viaje del Parnaso..........179

Language and Reality in Quevedo’s Sonnets.........201

The Comedia as Discursive Action...........221