Essays on the Literary Baroque
in Spain and Spanish America
John Beverley
2008, Tamesis
191 pages, hardback
THIS INNOVATIVE and at times challenging collection of essays, and even an interview with Fernando Gómez Herrero, confirms John Beverley’s position at the cutting edge of scholarship of the Hispanic Baroque. In answer to the question “are Golden-Age Studies obsolete” posed by Gómez but also by the author of this collection himself, for example, Beverley admits to have gone full circle back from cultural and subaltern studies, and tesimonio to a closer reading of Baroque texts, largely in response to the demand of students for a focus on the neo-Baroque. Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America brings together many years of the author’s work and outlines scholarly debates about the nature of the Baroque, peering back at feudalism yet forward to European modernity. Beverley writes: “On the one hand, it is clear that the Baroque is a cultural form imposed, along with the Catholic religion and the Spanish language itself, on the populations of the New World… On the other hand, it was also the model provided by the Baroque texts and artefacts that colonial letrados used to generate over time, and with an ever more acute sense of differentiation from the Spanish metropolis, a properly ‘creole’ or ‘American’ literature with its own thematic and formal characteristics.” His central preoccupations juggle the need to find a new paradigm in Baroque studies with ways of using it to reflect on the contemporary era. – GO’T
