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The Spatial Turn in the Literature and Art of Early Modern Spain

The Spatial Turn in the Literature and Art of Early Modern Spain

by Mary E. Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Series: Toronto Iberic

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

272 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 × 25.00 mm, 10 illustrations

Hardcover
9781487565336
Published: January 2026

£55.00

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Description
Contents
Authors

The Spatial Turn in the Literature and Art of Early Modern Spain investigates novel and transformative ways in which writers and artists of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain conceived of space through the lens of what recent studies have called the spatial turn.
With an emphasis on the production of space, as proposed by Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Yi-Fu Tuan, the essays in this volume explore space as a cultural construct, produced within a dynamic sphere of human interaction, performance, inquiry, and experience in a variety of public and private settings. New readings of specific texts and works of art engage mythological soundscapes, spaces of the sublime, monastic spaces of introspection, encyclopedias as spaces for memorializing old and new knowledge, and spaces of performance at public theatres and at court. In urban micro-spaces, the readers will encounter geotagging in Seville, surveillance in Madrid, and even the Neapolitan Our Lady of the Arch.
Edited by specialists in the fields of Spanish and comparative literature, Mary E. Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas, The Spatial Turn in the Literature and Art of Early Modern Spain is a fascinating study of the interplay of space and society.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Spatial Scene
Part 1: Spaces of Voicing, Intellectual Inquiry, and the Sublime
1. Acoustic Spaces: Vocal Performance and Trauma in Sonnets
Fernando de Herrera and Mary E. Barnard
2. “Ward Off This Gloomy Darkness”: Spaces of Conflict and Sublimity in Calderón’s La vida es sueño
Frederick A. de Armas
3. The Space of Memory: Three Sixteenth-Century Iberian Examples
Marina S. Brownlee
4. Geographic Games: Cosmic Mapping and Make-Believe in Jewish Thought, Medieval Alexander Romances, and Cervantes’s Modern Fiction
Keith Budner

Part 2: Spaces for the Performance of Alternate Realities
5. Early Modern Geotagging in Cervantes’s El coloquio de los perros
Carolyn A. Nadeau
6. Eluding Surveillance and Repression in Early Modern Madrid: Manufacturing Safety through Street Performances in Cervantes’s La gitanilla
Matías A. Spector
7. Performance Space in Cervantes’s Pedro de Urdemalas
Edward H. Friedman
8. The Person of a King: Sovereignty, Performance, and Court Spaces in Three Royal Imposter Plays
Christopher B. Weimer

Part 3: Sacred Spaces
9. Poeticizing Spaces in Seventeen-Century Religious Poetry
María Cristina Quintero
10. Mirrors, Self Portraits, and Visionary Exemplarity: An Analysis of the Guadalupe Chapel, Royal Discalced Convent, Madrid.
Rosilie Hernández
11. The Spatial Display of Poetry in Recibimiento al obispo Pimentel (1629)
Victor Sierra Matute
12. Spaces of Death: The Virgin of the Arch and the Cult of the Dead in María de Zayas’s La fuerza del Amor
Ryan D. Giles

Contributors

Mary E. Barnard is a professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University.

Frederick A. de Armas is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago..