Cervantes' Architectures: The Dangers Outside

by Frederick A. de Armas

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487542399
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press
Publication date:	04/15/2022
Series:	Toronto Iberic
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Frederick A. de Armas is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago..

Table of Contents

Foreword

1. Breaking Eurithmia

2. Temples and Tombs

La Galatea

Virgil and Vitruvius
Primavera’s Dissonance
Theatre
Hermitage
Temple
Tombs

3. Unstable Architectures

Don Quixote, I

A Mutable Structure
A Study in Melancholy
The Imperiled Home
Windmills
Occupancy at the Inn
Lucretia’s Castle
Prison / Castle

4. Windows

Don Quixote, I

Rear Window
The Ghosts of Place
Of Windows and Fortresses
Facing Windows
Window as Teichoskopia

5. Grotesque: Vying with Vitruvius

Don Quixote II

On the Way to Dulcinea’s Palace
Pantheon
Tower
Hellmouth
Grotesque Anatomy
Structures of Silence

6. Treacherous Architectures

Don Quixote II

Crystal
Gold and Alabaster
Torture Chamber
Barcelona

7. A Windowless World

Persiles I, II

The Prison
A Moment’s Place
Inns and Ships
A Spectral Palace
A Witching Space

8. Structures of Flight

Persiles III

Cityscape, Ellipse and Ellipsis
Lienzos
Sacred Places
The Veranzio Woman
Domitian’s Tower

9. Roman Architectures

Persiles IV

A City of Relics
The Invisible Villa
A Home in Jewish Rome
The Threatening Tower
Hipólita’s Enclosed Loggia
The Church Outside

Epilogue
Works Cited

What People are Saying About This

Mercedes Alcalá-Galán

"Cervantes' Architectures opens up a critical field never explored before, revealing how architectural space in Cervantes is dynamically integral to the poetics of his oeuvre. In this groundbreaking study, de Armas brings together his unsurpassed sensibility for art and ekphrasis and a deeply intuitive sense of the meaning of inhabitable places, imaginary and real, grandiose and humble, that avows the profound symbiosis between architecture and being human in Cervantes' literary fiction."

Juan Pablo Gil-Osle

"Cervantes' ellipsis and transformations of architecture urge us to revisit Baroque fictions of Spain as a necessary task to survive the uncertainties of climate change, the fear of the pandemic, and the claustrophobic months and years in our dwellings."

William Worden

"From looming towers to imagined castles to actual prisons, Cervantes' Architectures explores the diverse structures that abound in La Galatea, Don Quixote, and Persiles y Sigismunda. De Armas draws on Vitruvius' treatise on architecture, Renaissance artworks, the life of Cervantes, and modern theories of space and place to offer us new and fascinating ways to consider the multitudinous architectures constructed in Cervantine prose."

Hilaire Kallendorf

"Since he has started writing novels himself, de Armas' scholarship has become even more creative. It takes a novelist to truly understand the inner workings of a novelist's mind. This book's brilliance is matched only by its timeliness. De Armas has taken the subjective experience of being shut in during the pandemic and transformed it into a fantastic mental tour of the buildings dotting the map of Cervantes' architectural landscape."

Editorial Reviews

"From looming towers to imagined castles to actual prisons, Cervantes’ Architectures explores the diverse structures that abound in La Galatea, Don Quixote, and Persiles y Sigismunda. De Armas draws on Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture, Renaissance artworks, the life of Cervantes, and modern theories of space and place to offer us new and fascinating ways to consider the multitudinous architectures constructed in Cervantine prose."

—William Worden, Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Alabama

"Cervantes’ Architectures opens up a critical field never explored before, revealing how architectural space in Cervantes is dynamically integral to the poetics of his oeuvre. In this groundbreaking study, de Armas brings together his unsurpassed sensibility for art and ekphrasis and a deeply intuitive sense of the meaning of inhabitable places, imaginary and real, grandiose and humble, that avows the profound symbiosis between architecture and being human in Cervantes’ literary fiction."

—Mercedes Alcalá-Galán, Professor of Spanish, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and President of the Cervantes Society of America

"Since he has started writing novels himself, de Armas’ scholarship has become even more creative. It takes a novelist to truly understand the inner workings of a novelist’s mind. This book’s brilliance is matched only by its timeliness. De Armas has taken the subjective experience of being shut in during the pandemic and transformed it into a fantastic mental tour of the buildings dotting the map of Cervantes’ architectural landscape."

—Hilaire Kallendorf, Professor of Hispanic and Religious Studies, Texas A&M University

"Cervantes’ ellipsis and transformations of architecture urge us to revisit Baroque fictions of Spain as a necessary task to survive the uncertainties of climate change, the fear of the pandemic, and the claustrophobic months and years in our dwellings."

—Juan Pablo Gil-Osle, Professor of Spanish, Arizona State University

From the Publisher