Quevedo

Francisco de Quevedo (Madrid, 1580-1645) was well known for his rich and dynamic style, achieved through an ingenious and complex manipulation of language. Yet he was also a consistent and systematic thinker, with moral philosophy, broadly understood, lying at the core of his numerous and varied works. Quevedo lived in an age of transition, with the Humanist tradition on the wane, and his writing expresses the characteristic uncertainty of a moment of cultural transition. In this book Alfonso Rey surveys Quevedo's ideas in such diverse fields as ethics, politics, religion and literature, ideas which hitherto have received little attention. New information is also provided towards a reconstruction of the cultural evolution of Europe in the years prior to the Enlightenment, and thus the scope of the book extends beyond that of Spanish literature.

The transformation of the myth of Apollo and Daphne in literary treatments from Ovid through the Spanish Golden Age are studied in theme and variation, showing how the protean figures of the myth meant different things to different ages, each age fashioning the lovers in its own image. The Myth of Apollo and Daphne focuses on the themes of love, agon, and the grotesque and their transformations as the writers, through a kind of artificial mythopoeia, invent variants for the tale, altering the ancient model to create their new, distinctive visions.

This study offers an investigation of the various facets of Spanish Traditionalism--political, religious, literary, cultural, and stylistic--through the works of Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, one of the most complex authors of the Spanish Golden Age. Each chapter in the volume opens with a general history of the discreet facet of traditionalism that it treats. By this structure, the book is able to present a new approach to the understanding of the content and style of the works of Quevedo. Dr. Doris L. Baum consolidates the spirit of Quevedo's complex works, offering access to an underlying unity.