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| Baroque literature | |
|---|---|
| Name | Baroque literature |
| Period | 17th century (approx.) |
| Regions | Europe, Latin America, Philippines |
| Notable authors | Miguel de Cervantes, Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal, Jean Racine, Pierre Corneille, Molière, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Giovanni Battista Marino, Torquato Tasso, Giambattista Marino, Andrés de Claramonte, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz |
| Languages | Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Latin |
Baroque literature emerged across Europe and the Spanish Americas in the 17th century as an intense stylistic and intellectual movement reacting to Renaissance forms and the upheavals of the Thirty Years' War, the English Civil War, and the Counter-Reformation. Writers integrated complex rhetoric, elaborate metaphors, moral paradox, and religious interrogation while engaging with institutions such as the Catholic Church, the Spanish Habsburgs, and the French Academy. This literature intersects with developments in Baroque art, Baroque music, and political events like the Peace of Westphalia and the Glorious Revolution.
Baroque writers responded to crises including the Thirty Years' War, the Eighty Years' War, the English Civil War, and the expansion of empires such as the Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire, producing texts entwined with courts like the Habsburg monarchy and institutions such as the Jesuit Order. The movement overlapped chronologically with figures in science and philosophy like Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon and with legal-political shifts involving the Treaty of Münster and the Treaty of Westphalia. Baroque literature interacted with theatrical infrastructures including the Comédie-Française and Madrid corrales, and circulated in print networks centered in cities like Madrid, Paris, London, Rome, Venice, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Seville, Antwerp, Mexico City, and Lima.
Characteristic devices include extravagant conceits, layered metaphors, antithesis, and syntactic inversion exemplified in works associated with poets such as Luis de Góngora and John Donne. Themes address mortality and vanitas alongside spiritual conversion and damnation framed by controversies like the Council of Trent and Counter-Reformation polemics promoted by Ignatius of Loyola and the Congregation of the Index. Political and moral satire engages figures such as Thomas Hobbes and Blaise Pascal in dialogues about sovereignty and faith, while epic and pastoral strains recall antecedents like Homer, Virgil, and Dante Alighieri filtered through national traditions in France and England. Theatrical morality plays intersect with courtly spectacle traditions patronized by dynasties such as the Bourbons and the Habsburgs.
Iberian traditions center on Spanish Golden Age dramatists and poets linked to the Spanish Golden Age institutions in Madrid and Seville, with colonial extensions to New Spain via Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico City and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl in central America. Italian baroque manifests in the works of Giambattista Marino and Roman academies like the Accademia degli Umoristi, with Venetian print culture in Venice. English developments include metaphysical poetry associated with John Donne, George Herbert, and drama tied to the King's Men and events such as the English Restoration. French classicizing and baroque strains are represented by dramatists connected to the Paris Parlement and institutions like Académie Française including Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière. German-language expressions involve poets responding to the Thirty Years' War and courts in Weimar and Prague; Portuguese literature links to colonial networks in Lisbon and Brazil.
Key Spanish authors include Miguel de Cervantes (novel linked to Duke of Béjar patronage), Lope de Vega (plays staged by the Corrales de comedias), Pedro Calderón de la Barca (autos and secular dramas), Luis de Góngora (culteranismo), and Francisco de Quevedo (conceptismo). English exemplars include John Donne (Holy Sonnets), John Milton (epic engagements with Paradise Lost), and Ben Jonson (court masque collaborations with Inigo Jones). French figures include Corneille, Racine, and Molière whose comedies responded to salons around Madame de Sévigné and patronage from Louis XIV. Italian baroque poets such as Giambattista Marino and dramatists like Carlo Goldoni trace lineages to earlier innovators such as Torquato Tasso. Colonial authors include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and chroniclers like Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who shaped transatlantic literary exchange.
Forms include the epic, picaresque novel, pastoral, lyric poetry, metaphysical conceit, the autos sacramentales, and court masques produced for rulers such as Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England. Styles vary from culteranismo and conceptismo in Spanish to metaphysical wit in English and rhetorical neoclassicism in French tragedy performed at venues like the Comédie-Française. Drama was staged in public playhouses like the Globe Theatre and private court theatres, while the novel evolved through experiments culminating in proto-novelistic narratives exemplified by Miguel de Cervantes and the development of picaresque models echoed by Henry Fielding later.
Baroque literature impacted Enlightenment writers who debated forms with figures such as Voltaire, Denis Diderot, John Locke, and David Hume and influenced Romantic reassessments by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Its rhetorical density informed later modernists and symbolists including Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. National canons formed through state institutions like the British Museum and universities such as University of Salamanca and University of Oxford preserved baroque manuscripts that shaped philology in schools like École des Chartes and Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Baroque aesthetics persist in contemporary scholarship across departments at institutions like Harvard University, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, University of Cambridge, and Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Category:Literary movements