Mexican Arcadias: The Mannerist Pastoral Fiction of New Spain

Clifton, Teresa Joyce

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Year:: 2020
Contributor:: Clifton, Teresa Joyce (creator); Merrim, Stephanie (Advisor); Bass, Laura (Reader); Rhodes, Elizabeth (Reader); Brown University. Department of Hispanic Studies (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Seventeenth century; Spanish literature; New Spain; Pastoral literature; Mannerism (Literature); Mexican literature
Extent:: vii, 232 p.

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Abstract:: In the first two decades of the seventeenth century, two pastoral novels, one secular and one religious, emerged from New Spain: Siglo de oro en las selvas de Erífile by Bernardo de Balbuena (1608) and Los sirgueros de la Virgen sin original pecado by Francisco Bramón (1620). The present dissertation analyzes these two works, which are the first and possibly only colonial Latin American examples of this hybrid, uniquely sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European genre. It explores the pastoral novel as a vehicle for culture, particularly the shifting cultures of early seventeenth-century New Spain, or Mexico. Balbuena and Bramón shared a fleeting but significant cultural moment in New Spain. They produced two of the first Mexican literary manifestations of Mannerism, or the transitional movement between the Renaissance and the baroque and the inaugural artistic movement of post-conquest America. This dissertation seeks to connect Siglo de oro and Los sirgueros, both of which have remained isolated in scholarship. It situates the novels within the Spanish pastoral tradition that inspired them and establishes the relationship between the novels that links them to a burgeoning Mexican Mannerism. Over the course of four chapters, Mexican Arcadias takes the novels of Balbuena and Bramón as a lens through which to view artistic production of the New World. It traces the works’ roots in Old World literary heritage to propose that they adapt their European sources for an American context. It comments on the novels’ exploration of possible utopias and their creation of Mexican sacred places. It reads the novels as guidebooks to colonial society and, finally, as metaliterary treatises on New Spanish culture and authorship. The pastoral fiction of Balbuena and Bramón bears witness to Mexico’s creative and intellectual self-fashioning as a society separate from Spain. The authors establish a vision of Mexico as an heir to European culture capable of not only reproducing its intellectual inheritance but of improving upon it.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020

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Rights: In Copyright
Restrictions on Use: Collection is open for research.

Citation

Clifton, Teresa Joyce, "Mexican Arcadias: The Mannerist Pastoral Fiction of New Spain" (2020). Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:1129483/

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Hispanic Studies Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Hispanic Studies department.
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