Anne Holloway

Sonoro cristal: Pedro Soto de Rojas and the Eloquent Galatea

Abstract This article considers the early reception of Góngoras Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea by analysing the Baroque mythological fable ‘Fábula de la Naya’ from Pedro Soto de Rojas’ Desengaño de amor en rimas (1623). I argue that Soto restores the prominence of Galatea, as depicted in the classical versions of the myth, by placing the Gongorist Polyphemic lament in the mouth of a female protagonist. The self-authored notes which accompany Sotos fable gesture towards an ambitious metapoetic agenda, which places the Naiad at the heart of his directed reading. The fragile eloquence with which this female speaker is invested works against this collections overall movement towards closure and containment. Sotos Fábula may be read as a sylvan intersection in terms of seventeenth-century literary controversy; Naya, and her union with the conventional Fenixardo, becomes the poetic embodiment of a tense dialogue between poetic tradition and innovation.

Introduction realizing "La fuerça de imaginar"

One of the greatest stories never told, in any compelling way, is the history of the imagination, and its relationship to reality. Wallace Stevens’ ‘necessary angel’, briefly glimpsed, hovering on the threshold of the ‘real’ world it shapes, is just one envisioning of a concept that has spawned unexpected, and even ‘untimely’, artistic permutations. There is no smooth narrative through Foucauldian-inspired epochal shifts; certainly none that allow us to remain attentive to imagination’s polysemantic possibilities. For it is the very nature of the imagination to elude demarcation of boundaries (its own and those we would draw around it), and to slip the too rigid moorings of historico-ontological designations and epistemological domains. As the imagination has demonstrated in its myriad cultural productions throughout the ages, it ‘maketh matter’ in ways that can defy the linear machinations that have privileged ‘Modernity’, and deconstruct (if not dissipate) the dominant narratives suggested by weighted use of a

Para usted soy siempre yo: A Picaresque Double Act in Angeles Vicente's Zezé (1909)

Abstract Zezé, the 1909 novella by neglected modernist writer Ángeles Vicente, has recently attracted renewed interest, not least for its celebratory depiction of same-sex desire. Holloway explores the affinity between the figure of Zezé, the cupletista at the heart of Vicente’s novella, and the archetypal picaresque narrator. The text’s presentation as a record of a first-person narration to a single confidante, who invites comparisons with Vicente herself, anchors it within a longer tradition in Spanish literature. This study explores the possibility that that Vicente frames her feminist critique of societal conventions with a clever play on literary tradition.

‘O daughter … forget your people and your father’s house’: Early Modern Women Writers and the Spanish Imaginary

Abstract Holloway and Wray consider the perspectives offered by two very different seventeenth-century women: Mary Bonaventure Browne, or Mother Browne (b. 1615) and Lady Ann Fanshawe (b. 1625) both of whom exchanged Ireland for Spain, and both of whom record journeys both ‘real’ and imagined in their writings. Brownes deployment of hagiographical tropes in her History of the Poor Clares may reveal the potential impact of Iberian conventual culture; her allusions to the markers of sanctity insistent on the immutability of the body, whilst accepting and anticipating spectral presence in the form of bilocation. Fanshawe’s Memoirs are considered alongside the material legacy of her ‘Booke of Receipts of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordialls, Preserues and Cookery’. Her impressions both in transit and within the domus are similarly marked by receptivity and sensitivity to the host culture. Amidst a backdrop of religious persecution and political uncertainty, in both cases Spain emerges as a potentially enabling context for creativity and self-expression.