Baroque Spain and the Writing of Visual and Material Culture (Studies in Visual Culture) - Hardcover

"Alicia R. Zuese's wide-ranging study elegantly argues that seventeenth-century Spanish works of fiction, and in particular novella collections, were profoundly impacted by visual media. Baroque Spain explores the nexus of literary analysis, cognitive studies, and visual and material culture, and will be of great interest to readers outside of Hispanic Studies." --Patricia W. Manning, University of Kansas

By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters' mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audience's aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose -Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Maria de Zayas and Luis Velez de Guevara- as well as Alonso de Castillo Solorzano, Gonzalo de Cespedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Cordoba.