Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes

Among the many ancient techniques that shift or become problematized during the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, this volume focuses on one in particular, that of ekphrasis. It is through the lens of experimentation with the technique of ekphrasis that we can view Cervantes’ texts. Don Quixote can be studied through the constant contamination and agon between the visual and the verbal arts. This collection, then, seeks to foreground Cervantes’ contributions to the tradition of ekphrasis, and utilizes this rhetorical device as synecdoche for Cervantes’ innovations and transformations of art and thought during a period that has been called the Spanish Golden Age. The book renames this period as the Age of Cervantes and also seeks to show how not only Cervantes, but also his predecessors, contemporaries, and continuators viewed the relationship between the arts and particularly, the use of ekphrasis.