Traces the processes and paradoxes at work in the late parodic poetry of Luis de Góngora and Lope de Vega, illuminating correlations and connections.

This book provides an in-depth examination and analysis of the film and television adaptations of Lope de Vega’s theatrical dramas that have appeared on Spanish screens since the mid-twentieth century. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Allen draws on critical media literacy studies, film and adaptation studies, literary theory, cultural studies, and cultural historiography in his analysis. Allen argues that, given the problematic reception of Lope’s works in Francoist Spain, the canonical author never held a privileged position in the dictatorial propaganda machine. In fact, adaptations of Lope’s theater productions were subject to the same rigorous scrutiny, if not more, than any other screenplays that landed under censorship’s microscope. Allen analyzes adaptations produced during and after the nearly forty-year dictatorship and questions whether the adaptors of the democratic era created films and television shows that can sufficiently demonstrate how the spirit of Lope’s life and works can resonate with modern audiences. Scholars of film and television studies, adaptation studies, and history will find this book particularly useful.

During the Golden Age, poetry and drama entered into a dynamic intertextual and intergeneric exchange. The Comedia appropriated the different poetic currents prevalent during the Renaissance and also often enacted the controversies surrounding poetic language. Of particular interest is the influence of gongorismo on the comedia. Luis de Gongora himself experimented with dramatic form in his two little-known plays, "Las firmezas de Isabela and El doctor Carlino." In his quest for effective dramatic language, Lope de Vega dramatized Gongorine language through both parody and respectful imitation. Calderon de la Barca, whose plays represent the culmination of Gongora's influence on Golden Age theater, transformed gongorismo into a rich, performative code that functions simultaneously as poetic discourse and dramatic convention.

Prince of Darkness or Angel of Light? The pastoral masterpiece the Soledades garnered both titles for its author, Luis de Góngora, one of Spain's premier poets. In The Soledades, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination, Marsha S. Collins focuses on the brilliant seventeenth-century Spanish poet's contentious work of art. The Soledades have sparked controversy since they were first circulated at court in 1612-1614 and continue to do so even now, as Góngora has become for some critics the poster child of postmodernism. These perplexing 2,000-plus line pastoral poems garnered endless debates over the value and meaning of the author's enigmatic, challenging poetry and gave rise to his reputation, causing his very name to become an English term for obscurity. Collins views these controversial poems in a different light, as a literary work that is a product of European court culture.

"This volume aims to make the shorter poems of Luis de Góngora y Argote accessible to English speakers. It brings together the original Spanish texts, their English prose translations, and critical commentary for students and scholars interested in Góngora's work" -- back cover.

The first comprehensive study in English of one of the most important bodies of verse in European literature.