Julian Olivares – författare

Francisco de Quevedo was known throughout seventeenth-century Europe as the author of two Spanish best-sellers, the picaresque novel El buscón, and the satirical Sueños. Thoroughly Baroque in style, the poems share many traits with the metaphysical poetry of Quevedo's English contemporaries. His poetry has been a major influence on modern Spanish and Latin American poets. This study of the poetry combines a stylistic analysis with a philosophical interpretation in the broad sense. It is thus an aesthetic and existential study and concentrates on the love sonnets of 'High Style'. The poet confronts the courtly tradition with experience, taking a stand against its ethical restrictions. By means of irony and conceptismo, the wit displayed in his poetic conceits, Quevedo attempts to solve the conflict between ideal love and sensual passion. Professor Olivares also shows that the thoughts and emotions evoked by the experience of love are inseparable from Quevedo's anguished world vision.

Women's poetry of the Spanish early modern period.This collection of fourteen scholarly essays on women's poetry from Spain's early modern period shows that women did indeed have a Golden Age, and that they were significant cultural actors in the realms of poetic production. Thestudies of secular verse demonstrate how female poets of this period devised strategies to confront the dominant masculine poetic discourse, while the essays on sacred poetry explore the multiple manifestations of female piety andmysticism. The women's words are brought to life and modern readers helped to understand the socio-cultural, interpersonal, and aesthetic components of the poets' oeuvre. The volume, a companion to Julián Olivares' and ElizabethBoyce's revised anthology "Tras el espejo la musa escribe": Lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro, constitutes an authoritative critical enterprise focused on the recuperation of the female literary voice, and marks an important step forward in the battle to include women's writing as part of Spain's literary canon.Contributors: Electa Arenal, Aránzazu Borrachero Mendíbil, Anne J. Cruz, Adrienne L. Martin, Rosa Navarro Durán, Julián Olivares, Inmaculada Osuna, Amanda Powell, Elizabeth Rhodes, Stacey Schlau, Lía Schwartz, Alison Weber, Judith Whitenack.JULIAN OLIVARES is Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston and editor of Calíope, Journal ofthe Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry.