Overview
Baroque Horrors turns the current cultural and political conversation from the familiar narrative patterns and self-justifying allegories of abjection to a dialogue on the history of our modern fears and their monstrous offspring. When life and death are severed from nature and history, ""reality"" and ""authenticity"" may be experienced as spectator sports and staged attractions, as in the ""real lives"" captured by reality TV and the ""authentic cadavers"" displayed around the world in the Body Worlds exhibitions. Rather than thinking of virtual reality and staged authenticity as recent developments of the postmodern age, Castillo looks back to the Spanish baroque period in search for the roots of the commodification of nature and the horror vacui that accompanies it. Aimed at specialists, students, and readers of early modern literature and culture in the Spanish and Anglophone traditions as well as anyone interested in horror fantasy, Baroque Horrors offers new ways to rethink broad questions of intellectual and political history and relate them to the modern age.
Full Product Details
Author: David Castillo
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Imprint: The University of Michigan Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 22.60cm
Weight: 0.312kg
ISBN: 9780472034918
ISBN 10: 047203491
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 27 December 2011
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Available To Order
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Reviews
Readers should not be put off by this book's title. Here is horror at its most interesting, as a social and epistemological configuration that assumed its shape between the high baroque and the period marked by a new scientific spirit. If the interpretation of the baroque as an early modern epistemic holds ground, this analysis adds to its conceptualizing, and Castillo is superb in explaining and connecting materials that seems unrelated...Castillo offers an artful explanation of how these strange tales filled with suffering and despair point to a cultural crisis that expressed society's need to deal with the unknown. - Choice A joy to read, it is beautifully researched, and permanently seeks complicity with the reader. - Renaissance Quarterly
Readers should not be put off by this book's title. Here is horror at its most interesting, as a social and epistemological configuration that assumed its shape between the high baroque and the period marked by a new scientific spirit. If the interpretation of the baroque as an early modern epistemic holds ground, this analysis adds to its conceptualizing, and Castillo is superb in explaining and connecting materials that seems unrelated...Castillo offers an artful explanation of how these strange tales filled with suffering and despair point to a cultural crisis that expressed society's need to deal with the unknown."" — Choice ""A joy to read, it is beautifully researched, and permanently seeks complicity with the reader."" — Renaissance Quarterly
Author Information
David Castillo is in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.
