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Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean

By Paul Michael Johnson

© 2020

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.

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Product Details

  • Series: Toronto Iberic
  • World Rights
  • Page Count: 312 pages
  • Illustrations: 13
  • Dimensions: 6.0in x 1.0in x 9.0in
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SKU# SP006452

  • AVAILABLE DEC 2020

    From: $56.25

    Regular Price: $75.00

    ISBN 9781487507510
  • AVAILABLE JAN 2021

    From: $56.25

    Regular Price: $75.00

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Quick Overview

By reading the works of Miguel de Cervantes through the history of emotion, this book defies a series of long-standing commonplaces about the author’s writing and the Mediterranean region at large.

Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean

By Paul Michael Johnson

© 2020

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.

Continue Reading Read Less

Product Details

  • Series: Toronto Iberic
  • World Rights
  • Page Count: 312 pages
  • Illustrations: 13
  • Dimensions: 6.0in x 1.0in x 9.0in

  • 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 Diversity

    Part 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 Shame

    4. 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
    Conclusion

    Part 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 Exemplarity

    6. Aporias of Love: Articulating the Ineffable in Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
    Beyond Sentimentalism
    Aporias
    Ineffability
    Materiality

    Conclusion

    Afterword
    Works Cited

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