(A)Wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque

by David R. Castillo

Overview

The term anamorphosis, from the greek ana (again) and morphe (shape), designates a variety of perspective experiments that can be traced back to the artistic developments of the 1500's and 1600's. Anamorphic devices challenge viewers to experience different forms of perceptual oscillation and uncertainty. Images shift in front of the eyes of puzzled spectators as they move from the center of the representation to the margins, or from one side to the other. (A) Wry Views demonstrates that much of the literature of the Spanish Golden Age is susceptible, and indeed requires, oblique readings (as in anamorphosis).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557532275
Publisher:	Purdue University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2001
Series:	Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures , #23
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	182
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 9.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

David R. Castillo sits on the editorial board of the book series Hispanic Issues and has published articles on the work of Miguel de Cervantes, Baltasar Gracián, the picaresque tradition, baroque Spanish theater, the literature of the early colonial period, questions of nation-building, identity formation, and cultural theory.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	xi
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Introduction	1
Part 1	The Picaresque	19
Chapter 1	Putting Things in Anamorphic Perspective: The Case of Lazarillo	21
Chapter 2	The Gaze of an-Other in Guzman de Alfarache	35
Chapter 3	Look Who's Talking! Justina and Cultural Authority	54
Part 2	Cervantes	71
Chapter 4	Don Quixote: A Case of Anamorphic Literature	73
Chapter 5	Persiles, or The Cervantine Art of Looking Down and Awry	94
Chapter 6	A "Symptomatic" View of the Honor System in Cervantes's Theater	113
	Conclusion	131
	Illustrations	139
	Notes	147
	Works Cited	163
	Index	177