Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean
© 2021
For Miguel de Cervantes, to narrate a Mediterranean experience is to necessarily speak of an emotional experience. Affective Geographies takes as its point of departure the premise that literature is as influential in constructing the Mediterranean as are its geographic, climatic, or economic features. As the writer with the most vast and varied Mediterranean experience of his era, Cervantes is exceptionally well-suited for the critical task of recovering the literary Mediterranean.
Engaging with the interdisciplinary fields of Mediterranean studies, affect theory, and the history of emotion, Paul Michael Johnson reads Cervantes’s texts alongside the affective structures that inscribe the Mediterranean as a space of conflict, commerce, expansion, and empire. In particular, he argues that Cervantes’s writing, with its uncommon focus on the Moorish, Islamic, and North African experience, can serve to realign misconceptions about the Mediterranean we have inherited today. Affective Geographies proposes that, with a more than four-hundred-year history of impacting the hearts and minds of readers, Cervantes’s works constitute a literary longue durée, ramifying beyond fiction to alter the popular imaginary and long-term cultural landscape.
Product Details
- Series: Toronto Iberic
- World Rights
- Page Count: 328 pages
- Illustrations: 12
- Dimensions: 6.0in x 1.0in x 9.0in
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Reviews
"With clear and often elegant prose, Paul Michael Johnson’s battery of ideas about Cervantes are novel, captivating, scholarly, and endlessly engaging. Although this book addresses an audience of early modern scholars of Cervantes – and serves as a serious advance in state-of-the-art research – any reader wishing to learn about the workings of affect would benefit from it."
Diana de Armas Wilson, University of Denver"Affective Geographies is a major contribution to research in both the field of Mediterranean Studies and emotion as a field of scholarly inquiry, particularly within the world of Cervantes studies. Paul Michael Johnson’s outstanding study represents literary history of the best kind: his scholarly text is also highly readable and engaging. Best of all, he is capable of balancing his serious scholarship with his imaginative insights in extremely elegant prose."
María Antonia Garcés, Cornell University -
Author Information
Paul Michael Johnson is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at DePauw University. -
Table of contents
List of Figures
Part One: Casting Off
1. Introduction
2. Connected (Hi)stories: The Cervantine, Literary, and Affective Mediterranean
The Historical Mediterranean
The Literary Mediterranean
The Affective Mediterranean
Contesting a Sea of Discourses
Deviations from Reason in a Sea of DiversityPart Two: Quixotic Passages
3. Shadows of the Inquisition: Honour, Shame, and a Cervantine View of Mediterranean “Values”
Anthropologies of Mediterranean Honour and Shame
Visual Topographies of Shame
Shame Punishments in/and Cervantes
Conclusion: (Re)valuing Shame4. A Mediterranean (Tragi)comedy: Sancho, Ricote, and the Emotional Politics of Laughter
Gelotological Genealogies
The Emotional Effects of Laughter and Laughter as Affect
Sancho and Schadenfreude; or, Courtly Comedics
From Sadism to Satire
Sancho and Ricote
ConclusionPart Three: Other Ports of Call
5. Suspended Admiration: Wonder, Surprise, and Emotional Exemplarity in La Española inglesa
Aesthetics of the Unexpected: Tempering Sails
From Music to Mysticism: Early Modern Cultures of Suspension
Affects of the Unexpected: Tempering Fears
From Apatheia to Admiratio: Ethical Solutions through Affect
Conclusion: A Mediterranean Emotional Exemplarity6. Aporias of Love: Articulating the Ineffable in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
Beyond Sentimentalism
Aporias
Ineffability
MaterialityConclusion
Afterword
Works Cited
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Subjects and Courses
