This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

"A substantial contribution to an enhanced appreciation and understanding of Cervantes."--James A. Parr, University of California, Riverside "Those interested in Cervantes, Renaissance poetry, and the burlesque tradition in literature will find it informative and useful."--Edward H. Friedman, Indiana University

The Roman poet Ovid, author of the famous Metamorphoses, is widely considered one of the canonical poets of Latin antiquity. Vastly popular in Europe during the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, Ovid's writings influenced the literature, art, and culture in Spain's Golden Age. The book begins with examinations of the translation and utilization of Ovid's texts from the Middle Ages to the Age of Cervantes. The work includes a section devoted to the influence of Ovid on Cervantes, arguing that Don Quixote is a deeply Ovidian text, drawing upon many classical myths and themes. The contributors then turn to specific myths in Ovid as they were absorbed and transformed by different writers, including that of Echo and Narcissus in Garcilaso de la Vega and Hermaphroditus in Covarrubias and Moya. The final section of the book centers on questions of poetic fame and self-fashioning. Ovid in the Age of Cervantes is an important and comprehensive re-evaluation of Ovid's impact on Renaissance and Early Modern Spain.

Octavio Paz launches a far-ranging excursion into the "incestuous and tempestuous" relations between modern poetry and the modern epoch. From the perspective of a Spanish-American and a poet, he explores the opposite meanings that the word "modern" has held for poets and philosophers, artists, and scientists. Tracing the beginnings of the modern poetry movement to the pre-Romantics, Paz outlines its course as a contradictory dialogue between the poetry of the Romance and Germanic languages. He discusses at length the unique character of Anglo-American "modernism" within the avant-garde movement, and especially vis- -vis French and Spanish-American poetry. Finally he offers a critique of our era's attitude toward the concept of time, affirming that we are at the "twilight of the idea of the future." He proposes that we are living at the end of the avant-garde, the end of that vision of the world and of art born with the first Romantics.

This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.

Four hundred years since its publication, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote continues to inspire and to challenge its readers. The universal and timeless appeal of the novel, however, has distanced its hero from its author and its author from his own life and the time in which he lived. The discussion of the novel’s Catholic identity, therefore, is based on a reading that returns Cervantes’s hero to Cervantes’s text and Cervantes to the events that most shaped his life. The authors and texts McGrath cites, as well as his arguments and interpretations, are mediated by his religious sensibility. Consequently, he proposes that his study represents one way of interpreting Don Quixote and acts as a complement to other approaches. It is McGrath’s assertion that the religiosity and spirituality of Cervantes’s masterpiece illustrate that Don Quixote is inseparable from the teachings of Catholic orthodoxy. Furthermore, he argues that Cervantes’s spirituality is as diverse as early modern Catholicism. McGrath does not believe that the novel is primarily a religious or even a serious text, and he considers his arguments through the lens of Cervantine irony, satire, and multiperspectivism. As a Roman Catholic who is a Hispanist, McGrath proposes to reclaim Cervantes’s Catholicity from the interpretive tradition that ascribes a predominantly Erasmian reading of the novel. When the totality of biographical and sociohistorical events and influences that shaped Cervantes’s religiosity are considered, the result is a new appreciation of the novel’s moral didactic and spiritual orientation.

This volume contains seven sections, exploring in depth Cervantes's life and how the trials, tribulations, and hardships endured influenced his writing. Cervantistas from numerous countries, offer their expertise with the most up-to-date research and interpretations to complete this wide-ranging, but detailed, compendium.