Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds

Ed. Anthony J. Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook

This broad-ranging 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.

Poiesis and  Modernity in the Old and New Worlds, available from Vanderbilt University Press

Table of Contents

Introduction

Anthony J. Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook

Part I. Poiesis on the Threshold of Modernity

Chapter 1

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

Leah Middlebrook

Chapter 2

“Orphic Fictions”: Poesía and Poiesis in Cervantes

Anthony J. Cascardi

Chapter 3

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

Christopher Braider

Chapter 4

Encyclopedism, Poiesis and Modernity

Marina S. Brownlee

Chapter 5

From the Bibliotheca, to the Garden, and the Graveyard: Origins of the Poiesis of the Fantastic in Late Sixteenth-Century Miscellanea

David Castillo

Part II. Case Studies: Poesía and Poiesis

Chapter 6

Writing Religion: Sacromonte and the Literary Conventions of Orthodoxy

Seth Kimmel

Chapter 7

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

Elizabeth R. Wright

Chapter 8

Ribera’s Sagradas Poesías as Poiesis of Modernity in Colonial Potosí

Leonardo García Pabón

Part III. English and European Contexts

Chapter 9

“A Super-Political Concernment”: Evolution and Revolution of Inward Light from Juan de Valdés to John Locke

Julian Jiménez Heffernan

Chapter 10

Failed New World Epics in Baroque Italy

Nathalie Hester

Chapter 11

How to Reconquer Poiesis? Florian’s Gonzalve de Cordoue ou Grenade Reconquise (1791)

Fabienne Moore

Chapter 12

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

William Egginton

Chapter 13

Sense and Equivalence in Góngora and the Spanish Mystics: a Credit Crisis

Julio Baena

Afterword

Bradley J. Nelson