Details

Proposes the key role of visual language in baroque Spanish prose.Expands notions of literacy, since the writers emphasize competencies in oral composition and comprehension, and visualization, alongside book culture. Elucidates memory and visualization techniques (from Classical world and Counter-Reformation spirituality) embedded in popular literature. Broadens the scope of visualization beyond spiritual meditation and memory technique into the public realm because audiences of the novella genre could read or listen to the texts.Introduces developments in early modern embodied cognition and memory into baroque literary studies. Grounds Spanish novella writers' visual language in the genre's features inherited from medieval exempla collections.Uses methodologies from cognitive cultural studies to interrogate fictional representations of characters' mental activity and inner textuality.Brings together diverse manifestations of visual and material culture in relation to literature: medieval and baroque altarpieces, portraits, still lifes, paintings by Velzquez and El Greco, royal collections, fictional collectors, manuscript and book illustration, etc.