Love poetry in the Spanish Golden Age redefines the lyric poetry that is located at the centre of Imperial Spanish culture's own self-image and self-definition. This work engages with a broader evaluation of early modern poetics that foregrounds the processes rather than the products of thinking. The locus of the study is the Imperial 'home' space, where love poetry meets early modern empire at the inception of a very conflicted national consciousness, and where the vernacular language, Castilian, emerges in the encounter as a strategic site of national and imperial identity. The political is, therefore, a pervasive presence, teased out where relevant in recognition of the poet's sensitivity to the ideologies within which writing comes into being. But the primary commitment of the book is to lyric poetry, and to poets, individually and intheir dynamic interconnectedness. Moving beyond a re-evaluation of critical responses to four major poets of the period (Garcilaso de la Vega, Herrera, Góngora and Quevedo), this study disengages respectfully with the substantialbody of biographical research that continues to impact upon our understanding of the genre, and renegotiates the Foucauldian concept of the 'epistemic break', often associated with the anti-mimetic impulses of the Baroque. This more flexible model accommodates the multiperspectivism that interrogated Imperial ideology even in the earliest sixteenth-century poetry, and allows for the exploration of new horizons in interpretation. Isabel Torres isProfessor of Spanish Golden Age Literature and Head of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Queen's University, Belfast.

The Spanish Renaissance--a period of glory that endured from the late 15th century through the 17th century--comes to life in 40 of its greatest poems collected in this remarkable new translation, rendered with passionate fervor and a stylistic brilliance.

the first time that these sonnets have been brought together in one book translations that are not just accurate guides to the meaning of the originals but also enjoyable sonnets in their own right Offers detailed and incisive critical commentary on each of the poems; a complete and readable introduction.

The corpus of literary works shaped by the Renaissance and the Baroque that appeared in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a transforming effect on writing throughout Europe and left a rich legacy that scholars continue to explore. For four decades after the Spanish Civil War the study of this literature flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, where many of the leading scholars in the field were based. Though this particular 'Golden Age' was followed by a decline for many years, there have recently been signs of a significant revival. The present book seeks to showcase the latest research of established and younger colleagues from Great Britain and Ireland on the Spanish Golden Age. It falls into four sections, in each of which works by particular authors are examined in detail: prose (Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo, Baltasar Gracian), poetry (The Count of Salinas, Luis de Gongora, Pedro Soto de Rojas), drama (Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de Vega), and colonial writing (Bernardo Balbuena, Hernando Dominguez Camargo, Alonso de Ercilla). There are essays also on more general themes (the motif of poetry as manna; rehearsals on the Golden Age stage; proposals put to viceroys on governing Spanish Naples). The essays, taken together, offer a representative sample of current scholarship in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain experienced a literary Renaissance akin to that in England, with great poets, dramatists and novelists establishing new forms and blazing new trails: Garcilaso de la Vega, Góngora, Quevedo amongst the poets, Lope de Vega & Calderón de la Barca amongst the dramatists (although both were also poets), Cervantes - of course - amongst the prose writers. The Renaissance in England was also a time when translations of contemporary European literature became more common, beginning with contemporary Italian works, and the importation of the Petrarchan sonnet, and then Montemayor's Spanish version of arcadian pastoral. While Spanish literature was not the main focus of English translators during this period - no doubt affected by the strained political relations bnetween the two countries - it did attract some particularly fine writers to try their hand. This selection is driven by what is available, but it also manages to cover some of the greatest Spanish writers of the Renaissance and the Siglo de Oro: Juan Boscán, Garcilaso de la Vega, Jorge de Montemayor, Miguel Cervantes (some poems from 'Don Quixote'), Bartolomé & his brother Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, Luís de Góngora, Francsico de Quevedo, Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza and Juan Péerez de Montalbán. The translators are Herbert Aston, Philip Ayres, William Drummond of Hawthornden, Sir Richard Fanshawe, Thomas Shelton, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Stanley and Bartholomew Yong. The translations are never less than effective and, especially in the case of Fanshawe's Góngora, often show rare genius at work.