Frederick A. de Armas's Books

The Return of Astraea

An Astral-Imperial Myth in Calderón

By: Frederick A. de Armas

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The Return of Astraea

An Astral-Imperial Myth in Calderón

By: Frederick A. de Armas

In classical mythology Astraea, the goddess of justice, chastity, and truth, was the last of the immortals to leave Earth with the decline of the ages. Her return was to signal the dawn of a new Golden Age. This myth not only survived the Christian Middle Ages but also became a commonplace in the Renaissance when courtly poets praised their patrons and princes by claiming that Astraea guided them. The literary cult of Astraea persisted in the sixteenth century as writers saw in Elizabeth I of England the imperial Astraea who would lead mankind to peace through universal rule. This and other late flowerings of the Astraea myth should not be taken as the final phases of her history. Frederick A. de Armas documents in this book what may well be the last great rebirth of Astraea, one that is probably of greater political, religious, and literary significance than others previously described by historians and literary critics. The Return of Astraea focuses on the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and analyzes the deity's presence in thirteen of his plays, including his masterpiece, La Vida es Sueho. Her popularity in this period is partially attributed to political motives, reflecting the aspirations and fears of the Spanish monarch Philip IV. In this broad study, grounded on such diverse fields as astrology, iconography, history, mythology, and philosophy, de Armas explains that Astraea adopts many guises in Calderón's dramas. Ranging from the Kabbalah to Platonic thought and from satires on Olivares to cosmogonic myths, he analyzes and reinterprets Calderón's theater from a wide range of perspectives centered on the playwright's utilization of the myth of Astraea. The book thus represents a new view of Calderón's dramaturgy and also documents the popularity and significance of this astral-imperial myth during the Spanish Golden Age.

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Page Count

395

Publisher

University Press of Kentucky

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813181933

ISBN 13

9780813181936

Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain

By: Mary Barnard,Frederick A. de Armas

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Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain

By: Mary Barnard,Frederick A. de Armas

Collecting and displaying finely crafted objects was a mark of character among the royals and aristocrats in Early Modern Spain: it ranked with extravagant hospitality as a sign of nobility and with virtue as a token of princely power. Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain explores how the writers of the period shared the same impulse to collect, arrange, and display objects, though in imagined settings, as literary artefacts. These essays examine a variety of cultural objects described or alluded to in books from the Golden Age of Spanish literature, including clothing, paintings, tapestries, playing cards, monuments, materials of war, and even enchanted bronze heads. The contributors emphasize how literature preserved and transformed objects to endow them with new meaning for aesthetic, social, religious, and political purposes – whether to perpetuate certain habits of thought and belief, or to challenge accepted social and moral norms.

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Page Count

353

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1442664282

ISBN 13

9781442664289

Don Quixote Among the Saracens

A Clash of Civilizations and Literary Genres

By: Frederick A. de Armas

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Don Quixote Among the Saracens

A Clash of Civilizations and Literary Genres

By: Frederick A. de Armas

The fictional Don Quixote was constantly defeated in his knightly adventures. In writing Quixote's story, however, Miguel Cervantes succeeded in a different kind of quest — the creation of a modern novel that ‘conquers’ and assimilates countless literary genres. /spanDon Quixote among the Saracens considers how Cervantes's work reflects the clash of civilizations and anxieties towards cultural pluralism that permeated Golden Age Spain. Frederick A. de Armas unravels an essential mystery of one of world literature's best known figures: why Quixote sets out to revive knight errantry, and why he comes to feel at home only among the Moorish ‘Saracens,’ a people whom Quixote feared at the beginning of the novel. De Armas also reveals Quixote's inner conflicts as both a Christian who vows to battle the infidel, but also a secret Saracen sympathizer. While delving into genre theory, Don Quixote among the Saracens adds a new dimension to our understandings of Spain's multicultural history.

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Page Count

257

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1442696117

ISBN 13

9781442696112

Cervantes’ Architectures

The Dangers Outside

By: Frederick A. de Armas

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Cervantes’ Architectures

The Dangers Outside

By: Frederick A. de Armas

Cervantes’ Architectures is the first book dedicated to architecture in Cervantes’ prose fiction. At a time when a pandemic is sweeping the world, this book reflects on the danger outside by concentrating on the role of enclosed structures as places where humans may feel safe, or as sites of beauty and harmony that provide solace. At the same time, a number of the architectures in Cervantes trigger dread and claustrophobia as they display a kind of shapelessness and a haunting aura that blends with the narrative. This volume invites readers to discover hundreds of edifices that Cervantes built with the pen. Their variety is astounding. The narrators and characters in these novels tell of castles, fortifications, inns, mills, prisons, palaces, towers, and villas which appear in their routes or in their conversations, and which welcome them, amaze them, or entrap them. Cervantes may describe actual buildings such as the Pantheon in Rome, or he may imagine structures that metamorphose before our eyes, as we come to view one architecture within another, and within another, creating an abyss of space. They deeply affect the characters as they feel enclosed, liberated, or suspended or as they look upon such structures with dread, relief, or admiration. Cervantes' Architectures sheds light on how places and spaces are perceived through words and how impossible structures find support, paradoxically, in the literary architecture of the work.

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Page Count

489

Publisher

University of Toronto Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1487542402

ISBN 13

9781487542405

Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics

By: Frederick A. de Armas

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Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics

By: Frederick A. de Armas

A study of classical influences on Cervantes, with particular attention to Raphael.

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Page Count

268

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521593026

ISBN 13

9780521593021

Quixotic Frescoes

Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art

By: Frederick A. De Armas

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Quixotic Frescoes

Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art

By: Frederick A. De Armas

Quixotic Frescoes delves into the politics of imitation, self-censorship, religious ideology expressed through the pictorial, as well as the gendering of art as reflected in Cervantes' work.

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