Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds

Poetic making from Cervantes and Gongora to Descartes and Locke

This broadranging exploration argues that there was a special preoccupation with the nature and limits of poetry in early modern Spain and Europe, as well as especially vigorous poetic activity in this period. Contrary to what one might read in Hegel, the "prosification" of the world has remained an unfinished affair.

CONTENTS



Introduction

Anthony J. Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook



Poiesis on the Threshold of Modernity



Poiesis and Modernity at the Turn of the Spanish Sixteenth Century: Luis Alfonso de Carvallo and the Cisne de Apolo (1602)

Leah Middlebrook



"Orphic Fictions": Poesia and Poiesis in Cervantes

Anthony J. Cascardi



Spiders and Flies: Imagining "The World" in Early Modern European Natural Philosophy

Christopher Braider



Encyclopedism, Poiesis, and Modernity

Marina S. Brownlee



From the Bibliotheca to the Garden and the Graveyard: Origins of the Poiesis of the Fantastic in Late SixteenthCentury Miscellanea

David R. Castillo



Case Studies: Poesia and Poiesis



Writing Religion: Sacromonte and the Literary Conventions of Orthodoxy

Seth Kimmel



Scrutinizing Early Modern Warfare in Latin Hexameters: The Austrias Carmen of Joannes Latinus (Juan Latino)

Elizabeth R. Wright



Ribera's Sagradas poesias as Poiesis of Modernity in Colonial Potosi

Leonardo GarciaPabon



English and European Contexts



"A SuperPolitical Concernment": Evolution and Revolution of Inward Light from Juan de Valdes to John Locke

Julian Jimenez Heffernan



Failed New World Epics in Baroque Italy

Nathalie Hester



How to Reconquer Poiesis? Florian's Gonzalve de Cordoue, ou Grenade reconquise (1791)

Fabienne Moore



The Opacity of Language and the Transparency of Being: On Gongora's Poetics

William Egginton



Sense and Equivalence in Gongora and the Spanish Mystics: A Credit Crisis

Julio Baena



Afterword

Bradley J. Nelson