The Melancholy Void

Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora

Felipe Valencia

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496227676
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Spanish lyric underwent a notable development. Several Spanish poets reinvented lyric as a melancholy and masculinist discourse that sang of and perpetrated symbolic violence against the female beloved. This shift emerged in response to the rising prestige and commercial success of the epic and was enabled by the rich discourse on the link between melancholy and creativity in men. In The Melancholy Void Felipe Valencia examines this reconstruction of the lyric in key texts of Spanish poetry from 1580 to 1620. Through a study of canonical and influential texts, such as the major poems by Luis de Góngora and the epic of Alonso de Ercilla, but also lesser-known texts, such as the lyrics by Miguel de Cervantes, The Melancholy Void addresses four understudied problems in the scholarship of early modern Spanish poetry: the use of gender violence in love poetry as a way to construct the masculinity of the poetic speaker; the exploration in Spanish poetry of the link between melancholy and male creativity; the impact of epic on Spanish lyric; and the Spanish contribution to the fledgling theory of the lyric. The Melancholy Void brings poetry and lyric theory to the conversation in full force and develops a distinct argument about the integral role of gender violence in a prominent strand of early modern Spanish lyric that ran from Garcilaso to Góngora and beyond.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Gendering of Lyric and Epic in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–1590)
• 2. The Apollonian and Orphic Masculinity of Fernando de Herrera’s Algunas obras (1582)
• 3. Feminine Voice and Masculinist Aims in Miguel de Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585)
• 4. Between Liuvigild and Ingund in Juan de Arguijo’s Versos (1612)
• 5. “El melancólico vacío”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Felipe Valencia
• Series List