Baroque and Neo-baroque Literary Tradition (Lat.Am. Studies)

Introduction

The Spanish American Baroque, also known as the New World Baroque and the Barroco de Indias, has gone through an important critical revision in the last few decades as part of a wider reconsideration of colonial Latin American cultural production and, more recently, as part of a scholarly focus on transatlantic and hemispheric studies. An integral element of the Counter-Reformation in Europe, the Baroque traveled to the Americas to become one of the central literary and artistic expressions of the new identities being forged in the viceregal capital cities and as well as on the more remote frontiers of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. The exuberance of these aesthetic traditions is mirrored in the equally dynamic theoretical and critical paradigms inspired by the cultural production and the debates on the sociopolitical as well as cultural uses and consequences of the Baroque and Neobaroque representational styles. Critics have recognized the historical Baroque as both an imperial imposition on the subjugated Spanish colonies and as a more localized expression of resistance and creole consciousness, leading most scholars to understand that there are multiple Baroques in the Americas: those that reflect and mimic metropolitan power and prestige through the ornate literary and artistic styles of a “transplanted” European Baroque, financed by the exploitation of African and indigenous American labor, and the contestatory artistic interventions by marginalized Africans, Indians, Mestizos, and, above all, Creoles. The New World Baroque, then, is understood as the result of transatlantic colonization, slavery, and transculturation, and is often posited as the foundational literary movement of Latin America. If in Europe the historical Baroque was the aesthetic response to imperial crisis and religious schisms, in Latin America it became the mode by which colonial subjects began complex processes of identification, performative practices initiated in the 16th and 17th centuries and that continue to this day. The “return of the Baroque” in the 20th and 21st centuries, then, is often explained, in part, as an artistic and ideological reaction to the unfinished and continuing production and performance of identity in Latin America. Others see the recurrent Baroque elements in culture as an “ethos” or “spirit” that inevitably disrupts cyclical pulls to orderly, classical aesthetics, while other critics resist both this approach and the identity models to ground their readings in sociopolitical analysis of the early modern period’s Baroque and the later Neobaroque as a challenge to, or crisis of, that unfinished modernity.

Foundational Theoretical and Critical Works

Fueled by impulses of nationalism, and in some cases pan-Americanism, critics such as Picón-Salas 1994, José Lezama Lima, and Leonard 1959 (cited under Baroque of the Viceroyalty of Nueva España) directed our attention to nuanced ways in which Creole writers expressed a consciousness of difference in the creation of a unique cultural aesthetics in studies that captured the complexity of the New World Baroque societies and their cultural production with what might be considered proto-nationalist tendencies. Picón-Salas 1994 coined the term “Barroco de Indias” and introduced ideas that would be more fully developed by later scholars, including the recognition of indigenous contributions and transculturation to the cultural production of the period, cultural syncretism, the “hybrid” nature of the creole elites’ cultural production, and the important contributions of the Jesuits to the development of “creole consciousness.” Rama 1996 examines the role of “letrados,” those Lezama Lima famously called the “Señores Barrocos,” in the creation of elite cultures that excluded the popular classes. This approach emerges from Maravall 1986, a characterization of the peninsular Baroque culture as urban, appealing to the masses, and directed by elites, an understanding of Baroque aesthetics as the will to form an early modern hegemony in the context of the Counter-Reformation. González Echevarría 1993, in a series of essays on both peninsular Baroque masters and their American counterparts, argued that the Hispanic Baroque was the culture’s first expression of modernity, and that this modernity had its inception in the Celestina, whose motifs influenced writers of the historical Baroque and Neobaroque. Beverley 1988 and Beverley 1997 call into question the celebratory reception of the Baroque as the region’s foundational literature and reminds the reader of Rama’s central thesis on the elitism of the lettered city and goes on to suggest that by celebrating the Baroque as the original cultural tradition, continually renovated and reinvented over time, the exclusionary nature of the colonial Baroque is erased and we may therefore become distracted from contemporary ways Neobaroque aesthetics continue to be exclusionary. Ecuadorian philosopher Bolívar Echeverría explored the relationship between the Baroque and modernity in Echeverría 1998, positing a “Baroque ethos” that emerges with modernity and is resistant to capitalism and as potentially expressive of a utopian postcapitalist modernity. Moraña 1998 called for a rereading of the American Baroque that takes into account the relative independence of the vice regal societies and their unique cultural formations, to be interpreted on their own terms: as a discourse of rupture, vindication, and of “creole marginality.”

Beverley, John. “Nuevas vacilaciones sobre el barroco.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 28 (1988): 215–227.
DOI: 10.2307/4530398Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Article in which Beverley questions the arguments of those early critics who see the Baroque as a foundational literature and expression of collective identity in Latin America by pointing out the contradictory nature of the Baroque as both an “instrument of alienation and liberation” (p. 225).
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Beverley, John. Una modernidad obsoleta: Estudios sobre el barroco. Los Teques, Venezuela: Fondo Editorial ALEM, 1997.
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Collection of essays that lays out the two major alternative interpretations of the Baroque: a structure of control versus an expression of heterodoxy. Beverley shows how Góngora’s Soledades was a heterodox take on Spanish imperialism, an aspect of Gongorismo that becomes attractive to New World writers and offers them an imperial language of differentiation that founds the elite “Lettered City.” He concludes with reflections on the crisis of literature as representation and its relationship with the New World Baroque.
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Echeverría, Bolívar. La modernidad de lo barroco. Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1998.
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Philosophical essay in which Echeverría develops his notion of the “Baroque ethos” that emerges from Latin America’s colonial period of cultural mestizaje as a transhistorical worldview that is creatively resistant to capitalism.
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González Echevarría, Roberto. Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
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With a penetrating focus on language and identity, the monstrous and the bizarre, originality and tradition, this book explores the Baroque as an expression of modernity in Hispanic culture on both sides of the Atlantic. González Echevarría’s itinerary encompasses the historical Baroque and the Neobaroque from the Celestina to Severo Sarduy.
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Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Translated by Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
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Translation of La cultura del barroco (Madrid: Ariel, 1975). An indispensable touchstone for theorists of the Baroque, Maravall expanded the term’s until then primary application as an artistic and literary style, and redefined “Baroque” as a way of understanding the entire culture of the historical period of 17th-century Spain, one which he understood as subjugated to the power centers of the times, notably the Spanish aristocracy, the state, and the church.
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Moraña, Mabel. Viaje al silencio: Exploraciones del discurso barroco. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1998.
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An important theoretical reconsideration of the Spanish American Baroque grounded in readings of how colonial subjects negotiate imperial hegemony from subaltern positions. Moraña concludes the book with an appraisal of these and other Creole writers’ own reception and construction of what would become the “colonial canon,” which she theorizes as expressions of autonomous processes of identification and fundamental to an independent counterdiscourse in colonial historiography.
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Picón-Salas, Mariano. De la conquista a la independencia: Tres siglos de historia cultural hispanoamericana. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994.
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A precursor of the cultural criticism practiced by many active scholars of the Baroque, Picón-Salas not only coined the term “Barroco de Indias” but also presented the thesis that would later be developed by many critics that this literature expressed a “creole consciousness” that led to the 19th-century independence movements. The fourth chapter of the book, “From European to Mestizo: The First Forms of Transculturation” (pp. 48–74), is an early application of Fernando Ortiz’s concept to the understanding of the New World Baroque. Originally published in 1944.
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Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
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A now classic explanation of how the cities of colonial Latin America became the sites for the production of the New World Baroque by literate elites and an early characterization of the power relations at work in the Baroque, the marginalization of non-alphabetic forms of cultural production, and the recognition of the “diglossia” and “heterogeneity” at the heart of Latin American colonial literature and culture.
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Recent Critical Approaches and Debates

By the beginning of the 21st century, the field began to build on the earlier important contributions by teasing out the complexities of Creole subjectivities in relation to the empire and its other colonial subjects. Mazzotti 2000 collected a group of essays that reconsidered the use of the term “colonial” and the applicability of postcolonial theory in interpretations of Spanish American literature of the period by focusing on Creole writers of Peru and Mexico, many of whom form part of the New World Baroque canon. Bauer and Mazzotti 2009 expanded this line of research by anthologizing scholars working on these themes from a comparative, hemispheric perspective, bridging the traditional divide between scholarship on North and South America. Essays in Badía and Gasior 2006 focus on early modern Spanish language dramas from a transatlantic perspective. Spadaccini and Martín-Estudillo 2005 collects a series of essays with poststructuralist critical tendencies on both the Baroque and New World Baroque. Moraña, et al. 2008 is an important collective of critics who continue to problematize the relationship between the Creole writer and imperial power and colonialism. Jouve Martín and Soulodre-Lafrance 2008 provides an overview of a research collective based in Canada working on new avenues of inquiry on the Hispanic Baroque. Theorization of the Baroque continued in several important monographs, including Lambert 2008 which traces the analogy between the Baroque and postmodernism through many 20th-century writers and philosophers. Zamora 2006 traces how transculturation informs Baroque aesthetics in studies of literature and art from colonial as well as contemporary times, concluding that the New World Baroque, echoing several earlier theorists, is an aesthetic of counterconquest. Egginton 2010 posits reading the Baroque and New World Baroque as a “problem of thought” expressed through major and minor strategies, which he traces in several seminal works of art.

Badía, Mindy, and Bonnie L. Gasior, eds. Crosscurrents: Transatlantic Perspectives on Early Modern Drama. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006.
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Collection of essays on several New World Baroque playwrights and transatlantic themes in peninsular and New World Baroque dramas. Includes a theoretical introduction on “transatlantic changes and exchanges” in early modern drama by the editors and chapters on Tirso de Molina (Gamboa and Vélez-Sainz), Agustín Moreto and Pedro Lanini y Sagredo (Gascón), Cervantes (Pérez de León and Kartchner), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Horswell), and Sigüenza y Góngora (Nelson).
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Bauer, Ralph, and José Antonio Mazzotti, eds. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
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Collection of essays that contributes to the expanding field of hemispheric and transatlantic studies by focusing on the intersection between colonialism and creolization in English, Spanish, and Portuguese communities of the Atlantic World. While some of the studies focus on the early years of colonization, many contributors focus on later processes of identification among Creole writers and their processes of identification in the stratified empire.
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Egginton, William. The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo) Baroque Aesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
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In this important theoretical treatment of ideology in Baroque aesthetics, Egginton argues that the Baroque works through both a “major” and a “minor” strategy in the art and ideology of representation. The major strategy creates a desire for finding truth beyond the screen of appearances while the minor strategy affirms that representation is the only reality. Egginton tests his theory through a series of close readings of an array of theorists and writers from the Hispanic peninsular and New World Baroque cannon.
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Jouve Martín, José Ramón, and Renée Soulodre-Lafrance. “Introducción: The Hispanic Baroque Project y la constitución del barroco.” In Special Issue: La constitución del barroco hispánico problemas y acercamientos. Edited by José Ramón Jouve Martín and Renée Soulodre-Lafrance. Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 33.1 (Autumn 2008): 1–10.
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Introduction to a special issue dedicated to the work of an interdisciplinary, scholarly collective working on the Hispanic Baroque. The volume includes excellent contributions on a variety of theoretical issues, debates, and Hispanic Baroque texts and artworks. In addition to this volume, one may consult the Hispanic Baroque website, which has links to other studies and to the working group’s various initiatives.
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Lambert, Gregg. On the (New) Baroque. Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2008.
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Originally published in 2004 as The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, this is a useful analysis of some of the most important theoretical approaches to the Neobaroque. His central thesis is that the relationship drawn between the Baroque and postmodernism is one that has transcended time and national boundaries to return at moments of crisis and exhaustion of modernity.
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Mazzotti, José Antonio, ed. Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad “colonial” en las letras hispanoamericanas. Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000.
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Mazzotti’s introduction provides an insightful overview of the theoretical debates on postcolonial theory’s applicability to the Spanish American context. The essays collected here represent the beginnings of what has become a decade of scholarly focus on reconsidering criollismo and its complexity in the Americas.
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Moraña, Mabel, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, eds. Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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An important collection of twenty-three essays that return the Baroque critic’s gaze back to issues of colonialism and the “coloniality of power” that inform Baroque and Neobaroque cultural production. These theoretical and critical interventions, some of which are contemporary “classics” of Latin American philosophy translated into English for the first time, provide students and scholars with important critical and theoretical tools with which to consider the critique of Occidentalism, and its concomitant modernity, in any study of the Baroque.
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Spadaccini, Nicholas, and Luis Martín-Estudillo. Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.
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The introduction of this collection discusses the critical tension between the Baroque as an instrument of state hegemonic control and the Baroque as transgressive and liberatory, while affirming that in either reading the Baroque is an aesthetic and ideological reaction to crisis, and a fundamental expression of modernity. Eleven chapters on peninsular, Latin American authors and theoretical issues informed by poststructuralism are followed by Mabel Moraña’s useful exploration of the spectrum of terms “Baroque-Neobaroque-Ultrabaroque” and Edward Friedman’s afterword.
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Zamora, Lois Parkinson. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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Compelling study of art and fiction from the colonial times to the late 20th century that is grounded on the theoretical premise that transculturation is at the center of the New World Baroque’s creative energy, a process of “accumulation and accommodation” at the heart of Latin American identity. Zamora concludes that the New World Baroque represents the same energy of early times, now animating the Neobaroque in a counterconquest-like, antimodern (not postmodern) revision of the Western tradition in both art and literature.
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Reference Works

Adorno 2011 provides an excellent overview of Latin America’s foundational texts that culminates in insightful commentary on a selection of authors that form the Baroque of the Indies. This is a valuable introduction to the period for students and scholars alike. The anthology Zamora and Kaup 2010 represents the most complete collection of essays on the Baroque and Neobaroque available today, and includes translations of some of the seminal works from theorists and critics previously unavailable in English. Checa 1992 is a useful reference anthology of fragments of philosophical, literary, and theological writings from the Baroque period. Madrigal 1998 collects several foundational essays on colonial culture and various literary genres. Oviedo 1995 also provides an overview of the period. Arrom 1967 provides a comprehensive introduction and synopsis of colonial theater with two chapters focused on the Baroque, while González Echevarría 1996 affords the reader an excellent survey of colonial lyrical poetry with special attention devoted to the transition between Renaissance and Baroque styles in the Americas. Castillo and Schweitzwer 2005 represents the recent turn toward comparativist and hemispheric approaches to the early Americas, and includes reference essays on the Baroque.

Adorno, Rolena. Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Adorno synthesizes the period’s major topics and debates, moving the reader briskly through the 16th and 17th centuries, making insightful connections among the writers in the Indies and across the Atlantic to their European forbearers and contemporaries. She breaks the American Baroque into two chapters, one with a focus on the early urban writers of Peru, and the second on the later Baroque writers of Mexico.
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Arrom, José Juan. Historia del teatro hispanoamericano: Época Colonial. Mexico City: Ediciones de Andrea, 1967.
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Insightful guide to the early days of colonial theater in the Americas with two chapters focused on the Baroque works produced between 1600–1681 and 1681–1750. Arrom provides background on the dramatists and commentary on passages from classic examples from the period as well as some lesser-known plays.
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Castillo, Susan, and Ivy Schweitzwer, eds. A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
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Companion volume to the same editors’ anthology of primary texts from the colonial Americas that includes essays on authors and works from the Caribbean, North, Central, and South America. Represents a comparativist and hemispheric approach to the field, one which challenges more traditional disciplinary boundaries. Several contributors focus on the Spanish American Baroque and its relationship to other hemispheric and transatlantic traditions.
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Checa, Jorge. Barroco esencial. Madrid: Taurus, 1992.
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Useful selection of primary texts on the rhetorical, theological, and political thought of the 16th and 17th centuries written by the most important intellectuals of the Spanish metropolis.
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González Echevarría, Roberto. “Colonial Lyric.” In The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 1, Discovery to Modernism. 3 vols. Edited by Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, 191–230. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
DOI: 10.1017/CHOL9780521340694.008Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Discerning overview of the development of colonial poetry from the Renaissance Petrarchan tradition of the early years, through the influence of Garcilaso de la Vega, to the Baroque turn of the 17th century. Includes analysis of the “Academia Antártica” and brief, insightful exegesis of poems by Caviedes, Rosas de Oquendo, Balbuena, Espinosa Medrano, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
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Madrigal, Luis Íñigo, ed. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Vol. 1, Época Colonial. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1998.
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Useful collection of essays that provides overviews of the period and its major literary movements and figures. Most relevant are the chapters on colonial lyrical poetry (Emilio Carilla), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Georgina Sabat de Rivers), Juan del Valle y Caviedes (Daniel R. Reedy), Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (Jaime Concha), and the colonial “novel” (Cedomil Goic).
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Oviedo, José Miguel. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Tomo 1, De los orígenes a la Emancipación. Madrid: Alianza, 1995.
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Didactic introduction to the history of Latin American literature that dedicates one full chapter to the New World Baroque with two others accounting for the transitional authors before and after. Each chapter is organized by region. Useful for undergraduate and graduate students in need of an overview of the period.
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Zamora, Louise Parkinson, and Monika Kaup, eds. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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Zamora and Kaup organize this essential anthology around three theoretical concepts that parallel the three manifestations of Hispanic Baroque aesthetics: Representation (the historical, imperial Baroque), transculturation (the New World Baroque in its reciprocal, contestatory mode), and counterconquest (the Neobaroque of the postcolonial Americas), while also recognizing the overlapping and porous nature of these divisions and the complexities of how one understands the Baroque: as a period, as an ethos, as an ideology, etc.
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Anthologies

Becco 1990, de la Campa and Chang-Rodríguez 1985, and Serna 2004 are three comprehensive anthologies of poetry from the colonial period with inclusion of the most important Baroque poets. For English translations of a selection of Baroque poets from Mexico, see Paz 1958. Vicuña and Livon-Grosman 2009 provides one of the most complete anthologies of Latin American poetry translated into English and covers several Baroque and Neobaroque poets. Echavarren, et al. 1996 collects several Neobaroque poets from the late 20th century. For colonial Latin American theater, the most complete critical anthology is Ripoll and Valdespino 1972, which includes several New World Baroque dramas. Of the several anthologies published for use in university classes, Garganigo, et al. 2002 is perhaps the most comprehensive, with prose, theater, and poetry from both the colonial and Neobaroque canon.

Becco, Horacio Jorge, ed. Poesía colonial hispanoamericana. Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1990.
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Includes an excellent collection of the most important Baroque poets of the 17th and 18th centuries. Each poet is introduced by a short essay with a bibliography of the sources of the primary works and academic studies of the poets.
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de la Campa, Antonio R., and Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, eds. Poesía hispanoamericana colonial: Historia y antología. Madrid: Editorial Alhambra, 1985.
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Useful collection of early colonial and Baroque poets from both the viceregal capitals as well as smaller cities. Concise introductions to each poet with critical bibliography guide the reader and aid in understanding the development of the poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries.
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Echavarren, Roberto, José Kozer, and Jacobo Sefamí, eds. Medusario: Muestra de poesía latinoamericana. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996.
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Collection of Neobaroque poetry from the last third of the 20th century.
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Garganigo, John F., René de Costa, Ben A. Heller, Alessandra Luiselli, Georgina Sabat-Rivers, and Elzbieta Sklodowska, eds. Huellas de las literaturas hispanoamericanas. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.
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Pedagogically sound anthology designed for university-level literature surveys. Includes good introductions to the literary periods, including the Baroque and Neobaroque. Anthologizes full poems, as well as fragments from longer works. Also includes essays, theater, and prose.
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Paz, Octavio, ed. Anthology of Mexican Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.
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Anthology of English translations of a selection of Mexican poets, including several New World Baroque authors Bernardo de Balbuena, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
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Ripoll, Carlos, and Andrés Valdespino, eds. Teatro hispanoamericano: Antología crítica (época colonial). New York: Anaya, 1972.
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Collection of works by the most important dramatists of the Baroque period, including several short pieces and complete plays. Carefully edited with helpful notes and introductions to the dramatists.
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Serna, Mercedes, ed. Poesía colonial hispanoamericana (siglos XVI–XVII). Madrid: Cátedra, 2004.
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Useful selection of the most important poets of the colonial period, with many Baroque poets included.
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Vicuña, Cecilia, and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, eds. The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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Selection of poems spanning from the pre-Hispanic period to the present, including many poets not commonly anthologized and rarely translated into English. Some Baroque and Neobaroque poets included that are hard to find in English elsewhere.
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Baroque of the Viceroyalty of Nueva España

New Spain produced some of the most enduring Baroque literature of the Americas, in part due to the Viceroyalty’s unique and vibrant social dynamic shaped by its position as a crossroads of the Spanish Empire, between the Pacific and the Atlantic, and a center of the colonial, so-called “civilizing” mission of Mesoamerica and the lands to the north. Gruzinski 2002 provides a theoretically sophisticated study of how the colonization of Mexico (and other parts of the Americas) led to the genesis of “mestizo minds” that contribute to the region’s Baroque literary tradition. Merrim 2010 captures how Mexico’s “spectacular” city becomes a motor for generating Baroque literary works, festivals, and above all, “wonders,” through astute analysis of many of the most important writers of the times. Merrim’s work extends and complicates the seminal works on the colonial city by Leonard 1959 and Rama 1996 (the latter cited under Foundational Theoretical and Critical Works), both of which provide historical context and sociopolitical analysis, respectively, of the Baroque city. The classic monograph Leonard 1959 studies the context in which many Baroque writers worked and is still a pleasure to read for an overview of the complexities of New Spain’s Baroque society. The concept of the Creole “spectacular city” in Merrim 2010 provides a deeply nuanced extension and problematization of Rama’s “lettered city,” emphasizing the heterogeneity of the New World Baroque city in crisis and contestation to the Renaissance-inspired attempts to order the chaos through colonial impositions. Merrim shows how the 17th-century writers work to both contain and celebrate the heterogeneous nature of their city, all the while voicing an increasingly unique and independent, New World identity. Chang-Rodríguez 2002 provides a nuanced literary history of the period through a variety of essays written by specialists. Given the centrality of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and her circle to New Spain’s Baroque literary production, Paz 1988 is an excellent introduction to New Spain’s Baroque society and to Sor Juana’s literary work and the polemics surrounding it. Bernardo de Balbuena is seen as a precursor to that later period, shared by Sor Juana’s intellectual friend, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora.

Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel, ed. Historia de la literatura mexicana. Vol. 2, La cultura letrada en la Nueva España del siglo XVII. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 2002.
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This collection of essays provides an excellent overview to the development of literary culture in New Spain during the 17th century. Essays from leading scholars in the field range from topics on viceregal culture to studies of Baroque poetry and prose, linguistics and philology, and ecclesiastical influences.
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Gruzinski, Serge. The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization. Translated by Deke Dusinberre. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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An interdisciplinary study, drawing on history, anthropology, philosophy, and visual arts, of how the 16th-century colonization of Latin America resulted in hybrid cultures that in turn produced the New World Baroque. Gruzinski’s attention to indigenous writers and artists provides an important complement to other studies that focus more exclusively on the Creole or “lettered elites.”
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Leonard, Irving. Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places, and Practices. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959.
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Includes chapters on a variety of topics, from the idiosyncratic entry and quick death of an archbishop to book collectors and poets, to inquisitors and migrants. Leonard surveys the most important people of Baroque Mexico, and turns an equally curious eye to the Baroque spaces of the city, and the spectacular rituals of its pageantry.
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Merrim, Stephanie. The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.
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An incredibly rich study of the transition from Renaissance to Baroque culture in New Spain, with expert analysis and interpretation of depictions of the city, its public festivals, and Baroque “wonders” in canonical texts by Hernán Cortés, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bernardo de Balbuena, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as well as in less-studied works by Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, Agustín de Vetancurt, and Buenaventura de Salinas.
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Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or, The Traps of Faith. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
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Translation of Sor Juana Inés de Ia Cruz, o las trampas de la fe (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982). Paz’s notion of the Baroque as “transplanted” literature and the perceived lack of attention he pays to the feminist aspects of Sor Juana’s work have been widely critiqued; but his close readings of the nun’s texts, intertwined with analysis of the context in which they were written, and his highly readable style, make this an enduring contribution to New World Baroque studies.
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Bernardo de Balbuena

Bernardo de Balbuena (b. 1562?–d. 1627) is considered one of the earliest and most important poets to transition from Renaissance to Mannerist forms, as observed in the abundant ornamentation of his verses. He was born in Valdepeñas de la Mancha, Spain, but relocated with his family to New Spain as a youth and studied at the Universidad de México before entering the clergy. In 1606 he traveled to Spain to earn the degree of doctor in theology from the Universidad de Sigüenza. Besides Mexico City, he resided in Guadalajara and later held ecclesiastical positions in Jamaica, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico, where he was bishop until he died two years after Dutch pirates burned the cathedral, the convent, and his house and library. Balbuena’s masterwork is his mixed-genre, narrative poem, Grandeza mexicana (see Balbuena 1988), addressed to his lady friend, Isabel de Tovar, who had asked him for a description of Mexico. The explosive composition of nine cantos of hendecasyllabic verses organized in tercets, introduced by a royal octave, was preceded by Balbuena’s brief manifesto on Baroque poetry, “Compendio apologético en alabanza de la poesía.” As Merrim 2010 masterfully shows in this study of the “spectacular city,” Balbuena’s depiction of Mexico breaks with the Renaissance ideal of the ordered city to produce a complex, dynamic, chaotic, disruptive one expressive of a New World poetics of the marketplace. His only other surviving works are the pastoral novel with amorous poems woven throughout the text, Siglo de Oro en las selvas de Erífile (see Balbuena 1989), and his imaginative, fantasy-driven epic poem on the legendary Bernardo de Capio, El Bernardo o la victoria de Roncesvalles (see Balbuena 1852).

Balbuena, Bernardo de. El Bernardo. Madrid: Imprenta de Gaspar y Roig, 1852.
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Difficult to find in print, but a facsimile of this edition is available through Biblioteca virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
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Balbuena, Bernardo de. Grandeza Mexicana. Edited by J. C. González Boixo. Rome: Bulzoni, 1988.
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Critical edition of the poem with good introduction, bibliography, and notes.
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Balbuena, Bernardo de. Siglo De Oro En Las Selvas De Erífile. Edited by J. C. González Boixo. Xalapa, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, Centro de Investigaciones Lingüístico-Literarias, Instituto de Investigaciones Humanísticas, 1989.
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Critical edition of the pastoral novel with good introduction, bibliography, and notes.
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Merrim, Stephanie. The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.
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An innovative interpretation of Balbuena’s works focusing on his Baroque construction of Mexico City. Chapter 3 (pp. 91–127) centers on Grandeza mexicana as a creole celebration of the exotic and sublime city of exalted mercantilism. Chapter 4 (pp. 128–146) discusses the early reception of the poem and the creole poets who appropriate and complicate it in ways that further accentuate Merrim’s thesis that the New World Baroque is anything but a stable, monolithic aesthetic.
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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Celebrated in her lifetime as the “Tenth Muse,” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (b. 1651–d. 1695) is considered to be one of the most accomplished poets, dramatists, and polemicists of the New World Baroque. In recent decades her reputation has transformed her into a cultural icon and feminist heroine throughout the Spanish-speaking world and she is increasingly known to English readers and audiences through the many recent translations of her work, including performances of her plays. Her myriad experiences as a child prodigy from a creole family, then as a lady-in-waiting in the viceregal court, and finally as an Hieronymite nun in the convent of San Jerónimo all provided for the Baroque perspectivism and deep understanding of human nature that emerge from her works. Given her central place in New World Baroque studies, the scholarship on her work is vast and of great quality and the selections mentioned below should be consulted for their bibliographies for further study. Most of the critical editions listed here include insightful studies of her works. Cruz 1995 (originally published in 1951) and Cruz 1982 are the most complete collections of her works, each with excellent critical introductions and notes. Cruz 2000 is an excellent collection of her lyric poetry, while Cruz 1997 offers a bilingual selection of her poetry and prose. Cruz 2010 provides the best critical edition of her two most important secular plays, Los empeños de una casa y Amor es más laberinto. Cruz 2007 is an excellent English translation of her comedia, Los empeños de una casa. Cruz 1998 provides an excellent translation of her most important religious play, The Divine Narcisus/El Divino Narciso.

Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Inundación Castálida. Edited by Georgina Sabat de Rivers. Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1982.
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Edition of selected works from Sor Juana’s first edition of her works published in Madrid in 1689, carefully prepared by one of her most important critics. Includes representative works from all of the genres she produced, with critical introduction, notes, and bibliography.
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Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. The Answer. Translated and edited by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: Feminist Press, 1994.
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This bilingual edition of Sor Juana’s most important prose work includes an excellent introduction to the author and the letter and its context, as well as instructive notes to help the reader understand the nuances of Sor Juana’s rhetorically brilliant defense of women’s intellectuality. Also includes a selection of poems, thematically related to the letter and of diverse genres, along with their translations into English.
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Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Obras completas. 4 vols. Edited by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte and Alberto G. Salcedo. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995.
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This four-volume edition, with an exhaustive introduction and detailed notes throughout, is organized as follows: Vol. 1, her secular lyric poetry; Vol. 2, her religious poetry; Vol. 3, her religious theater; Vol. 4, her secular theater, prose, and documents attributed to her. Plancarte edited the first three volumes and Salcedo finished the project with Volume 4. Originally published in 1951.
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Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Translated with notes by Margaret Sayers Peden and introduction by Ilan Stavans. New York: Penguin, 1997.
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This bilingual selection of Sor Juana’s works includes the full texts of her Respuesta, the Loa for the auto sacramental El Divino Narciso, and Primero sueño, in addition to a representative selection of her lyric poetry. Good for a general reader, however, the edition lacks a critical apparatus such as the explanatory notes and glosses found in the Plancarte and González Boixo editions.
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Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. The Divine Narcissus/El Divino Narciso. Translated by Patricia Peters and Renée Domeier. Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1998.
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First full translation of the auto sacramental and its famous loa. Includes a critical introduction and short bibliography. The loa can be read as a stand-alone piece that interrogates, and perhaps seeks reconciliation of, the so-called spiritual conquest of America through clever dialogues of allegorical figures representing both Spanish and Aztec perspectives.
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Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Poesía lírica. Edited by José Carlos González Boixo. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000.
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A useful critical anthology of Sor Juana’s lyric poetry primarily based on the early editions of her poems and the more recent editions by Plancarte and Sabat de Rivers. The introduction reviews the major moments of Sor Juana’s life and then organizes the presentation of the poems by genre, with brief commentary on a selection of the works. Includes the complete Primero sueño with helpful glosses.
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Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Los empeños de una casa/Pawns of a House. Edited by Susana Hernández Araico and translated by Michael McGaha. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press, 2007.
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Translation into English of the complete Baroque festejo (loa, letras, comedia, sainetes, and sarao). Most of the work is translated into prose form, with the preservation of verse form in the more overtly musical parts of the work. With a useful and critically informed introduction, translator’s note, and bibliography.
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Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Los empeños de una casa y Amor es más laberinto. Edited by Celsa Carmen García Valdés. Madrid: Cátedra, 2010.
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Excellent critical edition of two of Sor Juana’s secular plays, including the complete Baroque festejo (loa, letras, comedia, sainetes, and sarao) that constituted the performance of the cloak-and-sword comedia, Los empeños de una casa. García Valdés works from the princeps and Salcedo’s editions and includes an extensive critical bibliography and copious explanatory notes.
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Literary Criticism

Sor Juana is the most widely studied of the New World Baroque writers. The critical bibliography exceeds the limits of this entry; therefore, one is encouraged to explore the works cited in all of these more recent contributions to scholarship on Sor Juana. Bergmann and Schlau 2007 provides a current and comprehensive overview of the scholarship on Sor Juana by leading scholars in the field, as well as essays on pedagogical approaches to her works. Arenal and Schlau 1989 offers an early study of the women writers working from convents in the Hispanic world, while Paz 1988 is Sor Juana’s most extensive literary biography, including insightful explications of her work and its social and political context. Sabat de Rivers 1998 collects many of the groundbreaking scholar’s most important essays into a volume dedicated to unraveling the complexities of Sor Juana’s identity. Merrim 1991 and Merrim 1999 expand earlier feminist approaches to the poet to include comparativist studies of Sor Juana in relation to other women writers of the times. Martínez-San Miguel 1999 brings postcolonial sensibility to an analysis of her works that reveal the complex subjectivities expressed through varied literary genres that challenged the status quo of her times. Schmidhuber 2000 concentrates on Sor Juana’s secular theater.

Arenal, Electa, and Stacey Schlau. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Translated by Amanda Powell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.
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Pioneering work on the literary productions of nuns and their cultural milieu, including chapters on Sor Juana. This study opened scholarship to the idea of the convent being a space of autonomy for women to pursue their intellectual interests, including the production of literary works.
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Bergmann, Emilie L., and Stacey Schlau. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2007.
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Excellent resource for instructors who teach or write about Sor Juana’s works. Includes essays from the most prolific contemporary Sor Juana scholars on approaches to the teaching of different genres and masterworks produced by Sor Juana; survey results from university professors’ responses on how they teach the author and her period; essays on editions and translations of her work; and an extensive critical bibliography.
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Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. Saberes americanos: Subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana. Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 1999.
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Outstanding analysis of Sor Juana’s construction of the multiple subjectivities embodied in her writings and her groundbreaking inclusion of multiple “knowledges” from heterogeneous New Spain to challenge Old World intellectual paradigms. Martinez-San Miguel’s close readings of a variety of Sor Juana’s works are grounded in a thorough knowledge of the critical literature as well as a sophisticated theoretical frame.
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Merrim, Stephanie. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.
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One of the first book-length studies to study Sor Juana in a comparative mode by reading her works along with other early modern women writers from Spain, France, England, and the Americas. Merrim studies Sor Juana along with Marie de Gournay, Margaret Fell Fox, Catalina de Erauso, Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro, Mme de Lafayette, Anne Bradstreet, Saint Teresa, and Margaret Lucas Cavendish.
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Merrim, Stephanie, ed. Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.
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This important collection of essays represents a range of feminist approaches to a variety Sor Juana’s works from the several different literary genres she produced.
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Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or, The Traps of Faith. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
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Translation of Sor Juana lnés de Ia Cruz, o las trampas de la fe (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982). While Paz concentrates primarily on the writings of Sor Juana, he also provides several chapters on the general cultural milieu of her times in New Spain.
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Sabat de Rivers, Georgina. En busca de Sor Juana. Mexico City: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998.
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This collection of essays on Sor Juana, by one of the most important editors and scholars of her work, is a culmination of Sabat de Rivers’s lifelong dedication to unraveling the complexities of Sor Juana as a poet, a woman, and a creole subject of Baroque Mexico. Each of these subjectivities is explored in depth and with subtlety in the dozen or so chapters that comprise the book.
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Schmidhuber, Guillermo. The Three Secular Plays of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000.
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A thorough analysis of Sor Juana’s secular plays, including archival research that establishes her as the coauthor, with Agustín Salazar y Torres, of an earlier, “lost” secular play, La segunda Celestina.
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Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora

Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (b. 1645–d. 1700) was born to a prominent creole family in Mexico City, where he was educated by the Jesuits and then expelled from the company for “youthful indiscretions.” Leonard 1929 provides a lively cultural biography and informs us that he studied theology at the University of Mexico, where he later obtained the chair of astronomy and mathematics in 1672; he also served as the chaplain of the Hospital del Amor de Dios until his death. His multiple talents and intellectual interests are reflected in the myriad works of astronomy, history, cosmography, engineering, mathematics, poetry, and creative narrative that he produced. A contemporary and friend to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sigüenza is best known today for the intriguing adventure tale Infortunios de Alonso Ramirez. Sigüenza y Góngora 2011 is the most recent critical edition of this classic colonial narrative, while López-Lázaro 2011 provides an excellent translation into English and a compelling critical introduction to the text. Recent scholarship has also focused on other works, including his history of a Mexican convent, Paraíso Occidental (see Ross 1993), his allegorical monument celebrating the arrival of a viceroy, which has recently been published in a new edition, Sigüenza y Góngora 1995. Teatro de virtudes políticas (see Nelson 2006), and his controversial reaction to Indian protests of an economic crisis in Mexico City, Alboroto y motín de los indios de México del 8 de junio de 1692 (see Rabasa 1994) are both anthologized in Sigüenza y Góngora 1984. Primavera Indiana (1668) is one of his earliest poems and expressions of his creole proclivities; he dedicated the royal octaves to the Virgen de Guadalupe, contributing to her growing popularity in the 17th century.

Leonard, Irving A. Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929.
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A classic biography of the writer with a useful catalog of his works. Reprinted in 1974 (Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint).
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López-Lázaro, Fabio, ed. and trans. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramirez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th Century Pirates. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.
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A new English translation of the text with a critical introduction that provides new archival evidence of the correspondence between the Count of Galve, the viceroy who commissioned the work, and his interlocutors in the metropolis, in addition to other new details that expand our understanding of this fascinating narrative. His admirable translation is well annotated with copious notes and critical bibliography.
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Nelson, Bradley. “Sigüenza and Sor Juana’s fiestas alegóricas: An Inquiry into Redemptive Hegemony and Its Dissolution.” In Crosscurrents: Transatlantic Perspectives on Early Modern Drama. Edited by Mindy Badía and Bonnie L. Gasior, 104–123. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006.
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Explores the rhetorical and symbolic strategies employed in the Teatro de virtudes políticas, compared to Sor Juana’s Neptuno alegórico, to contrast the two authors’ representations of history, authority, and identity.
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Rabasa, José. “Pre-Columbian Pasts and Indian Presents in Mexican History.” Dispositio/n: American Journal of Cultural Histories and Theories 19.46 (1994): 245–270.
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Provocative reading of Alboroto y motín de los indios de México from a postcolonial theoretical perspective that examines the rhetorical construction of the Indian in Sigüenza’s text, along with the Códice Mendoza, in order to question how creole historians erase subaltern political expression of their contemporary Indians while exalting the pre-Hispanic past in search of a usable history for proto-nationalist projects.
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Ross, Kathleen. The Baroque Narrative of Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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A persuasive study of the author’s Paradyso occidental (1684), a history of the Convento Real de Jesús María of Mexico City, which problematizes the relationship between the author and his female subjects, whose stories are filtered through patriarchal representations. Ross analyzes the author’s use of language, his rewriting of earlier, New World histories, and his ideological positioning in relation to metropolitan hegemonies, and his expression of a decidedly creole perspective.
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Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. Seis Obras. Edited by Irving A. Leonard and William G. Bryant. Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1984.
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Useful edition with prologue by Leonard and helpful commentary and notes by Bryant. Includes Alboroto y motín de los indios de México and Teatro de virtudes políticas, among other texts.
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Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. Paraíso Occidental. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional Para La Cultura y Las Artes, 1995.
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A recent edition of Sigüenza’s history of the Convento Real de Jesús María of Mexico City.
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Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. Infortunios de Alonso Ramirez. Edited by Asima F. X. Saad Maura. Doral, FL: Stockcero, 2011.
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Critical edition based on the princeps, with useful notes, translations, and commentary. Infortunios has confounded those attempting to determine its literary genre; it has been interpreted as a relación, a late picaresque novel, an early testimonio, and the first Latin American novel.
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Other Authors of New Spain

Many other minor authors who contributed to the Baroque literature produced in New Spain can be found in the anthologies included elsewhere in this entry, especially in Becco 1990, de la Campa and Chang-Rodríguez 1985, Paz 1958, and Serna 2004 (all cited under Anthologies). Of special note, Francisco Bramón is considered an important precursor of the later tradition of plays, poems, and prose devoted to the Virgin and to the mixing of indigenous forms with Baroque genres. His Baroque pastoral novel (see Bramón 1944) is considered the first novel published in Mexico. Bramón included an one-act auto sacramental with letras (poems meant to be sung) reminiscent of villancicos, and a culminating scene in which the allegorical Aztec Mexico performs a tocotin, or ritual dance, in honor of the Virgin, an antecedent of Sor Juana’s use of the dance in her loa to El Divino Narciso. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (b. 1581?–d. 1639) was born and raised in Mexico, but achieved fame for his dramas and comedias in Spain, where he wrote his plays. Many debate whether or not to consider him a “New World” writer, though Ripoll and Valdespino 1972 (cited under Anthologies) does include two of his plays (La verdad sospechosa and Ganar amigos) in his anthology of colonial theater and Concha 1998 characterizes him as an indiano with many of the characteristics of the “in-between subjectivity” common to the period. Whicker 2003 offers an excellent analysis of many of Alarcón’s plays and the sense of ethics and morality expressed by his characters, a critique of metropolitan society that might have been inspired in part by Alarcón’s experience as an outsider in the peninsula. Ruiz de Alarcón and Hartzenbusch 1946 is a good edition of several of his plays, while Ruiz de Alarcón and Ebersole 1992 is a more recent critical edition of his most famous play. Jesuit poet Matías de Bocanegra (b. 1612–d. 1668) wrote one of the most widely anthologized poems of the Mexican Baroque, “Canción a la vista de un desengaño” (see Bocanegra 2004), which can be found in Paz 1958 and Serna 2004 (both cited under Anthologies). A narrative poem composed of liras and ending in a romance, the canción is derived from the poetics of Luis de Góngora and Calderón de la Barca, who also influenced Bocanegra’s writing of a hagiographic play, Comedia de San Francisco de Borja.

Bocanegra, Matías de. “Canción a la vista de un desengaño.” In Poesía colonial hispanoamericana (siglos XVI–XVII). Edited by Mercedes Serna, 343–354. Madrid: Cátedra, 2004.
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An allegorical and didactic poem imitative of many Baroque conceits and motifs, this is considered to be the Jesuit’s masterpiece and was imitated by many in the years after its original circulation.
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Bramón, Francisco. Los sigueros de la Virgen sin original pecado (1620). Edited by Joaquín Bolaños and Agustín Yáñez. Mexico City: Ediciones de La Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1944.
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A Baroque pastoral novel set in the Mexican countryside for the purpose of celebrating the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in honor of her patronage of the University of Mexico.
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Concha, Jaime. “Juan Ruiz de Alarcón.” In Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Tomo I, Época Colonial. Edited by Luis Íñigo Madrigal, 353–368. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1998.
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Insightful essay that explicates the complexity of Alarcón’s subjectivity as a “foreigner who contemplates from a distance a castizo and courtly Spain that both attracts him and rejects him” (p. 354).
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Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan, and Alva V. Ebersole, eds. La verdad sospechosa. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1992.
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Critical edition of his most famous play, with a good introduction and helpful notes. This comedia de enredo is not only highly entertaining but also insightfully critical of Spanish society, especially the honor system based on heredity, which he puts into question while proposing that a person’s actions should be the measure of his worth, instead.
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Ruiz de Alarcón, Juan, and Juan E. Hartzenbusch, eds. Comedias de Don Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza. Madrid: Atlas, 1946.
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Collection of many of the most famous plays written by the dramatist.
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Whicker, Jules. The Plays of Juan Ruiz De Alarcón. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2003.
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Excellent study of the playwright’s “self-fashioning” for personal advancement in the Baroque world of popular theater. Whicker argues that Alarcón’s plays can be read as a defense of the comedia in that they provide for a moral use of illusion and deception in social critique of the times.
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Baroque of the Viceroyalty of Peru

Like Mexico City, Lima became a major political and cultural center where the New World Baroque proliferated through art, architecture, public ceremony, and literature. The capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, which by 1650 administered satellite audiencias in Quito, Charcas, Chile, and Santa Fe de Bogotá and Panamá, was an important port and therefore also a crossroads of the empire where many influences mixed to form a heterogeneous viceregal society, whose complex, multicultural history Higgins 2005 provides in a lucid and well-research monograph. Osorio 2008 is an excellent study of the emergence of the early modern city and its Baroque aesthetic production. As González Echevarría 1996 has shown, concomitant to the Viceroyalty beginning to prosper at the end of the 16th century, the literary culture grew and poets began to transition from imitating Renaissance forms, especially Petrarchan-inspired verses, to creating Baroque works. The Academia Antártica was the most important group of writers to emerge as emblematic of the transition, a group comprised of many relocated Spaniards and American-born creoles striving to find their voices in a new land, while desiring to be relevant in the metropolis. The indigenous writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala absorbs much of these early New World Baroque literary tendencies from ecclesiastical sources and deploys them along with native paradigms to fashion his monumental, illustrated history of the Andes and critique of colonial society. Juan de Espinosa Medrano (“El Lunarejo”), a mestizo, or possibly indigenous, writer and orator, deployed a fully developed Baroque style, in the tradition of Luis de Góngora, in his plays and poetic treatises written from Cuzco, rather than Lima. Juan del Valle y Caviedes represents a later generation of writers with an acerbic satirical wit dedicated to critique viceregal society. Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo exemplifies the pinnacle of creole erudition and the transition from late Baroque to 18th-century Enlightenment thinking and Neoclassicism.

González Echevarría, Roberto. “Colonial Lyric.” In The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Vol. 1, Discovery to Modernism. 3 vols. Edited by Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker, 191–230. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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Discerning overview of the development of colonial poetry from the Renaissance Petrarchan tradition of the early years, through the influence of Garcilaso de la Vega, to the Baroque turn of the 17th century. Most germane to this entry is the attention placed on the “Academia Antártica” as poets of transition to the Barroco de Indias.
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Higgins, James. Lima: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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Cultural history of Lima that covers its development from the pre-Hispanic to contemporary period. The first two chapters are especially relevant for understanding the Baroque period of the city’s history.
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Osorio, Alejandra B. Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea Metropolis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
DOI: 10.1057/9780230612488Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important contribution to both the study of early modern cities and the Spanish transatlantic empire, this book is a cultural history of Lima, from its fledgling founding to its exuberant flourishing as a viceregal capital. The author emphasizes the Baroque aesthetics that inform the myriad cultural products analyzed, from epic poetry to chronicles, to architecture, to viceregal and church ceremonies and spectacles, to the Inquisition’s saints and idolaters.
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La Academia Antártica

A collective of mostly radicados (Spaniards living in the Americas) and creole poets formed this literary society at the end of the 16th century in Lima, Peru, to share in the translating of Greek and Latin classical poets, and the writing and publishing of their own works. Most likely imitative of similar literary societies in Seville, Spain, from which some of the members came and where the society’s publications were printed, the Academia Antártica produced two known anthologies, Primera parte del Parnaso Antártico de obras amatorias (1608) and the Segunda parte del Parnaso Antártico de divinos poemas (c. 1617). The first part of the collection included one of its more prominent members, Diego Mejía de Fernangil’s, celebrated translation of Ovid’s Heroides, an indication of the group’s classical proclivities, a characteristic notable in all of the society members’ works. The anonymous poet Clarinda’s “Discurso en Loor de la poesía” (see Cornejo 2000) was included as a celebratory prologue to the Primera parte del Parnaso Antártico and is now studied as one of the few examples of female poetic voices from the period (see Chang-Rodríguez 2005) and as a defense of the quality of poetry being produced in the colonies. Another anonymous female poet, Amarilis, also participated in the Academia Antártica and is known today for her poem she wrote to Lope de Vega, “Epistola de Amarilis a Belardo” (see Amarilis 2004), in which she declares her platonic love for the poet and playwright, who responds by publishing the poem in two of his works. Pedro de Oña is one of the more prolific members of the Academia, and his poetry reflects an increasingly more Baroque style than others in the group (see Oña and Medina 1917). He is best known for his epic rejoinder to Ercilla’s La Araucana, La araucana domada (1596). Diego de Hojeda wrote an epic poem, La Cristiada (1611), which recounts the passion of Christ in royal octaves that are considered some of the better verses written in the early part of the century and a clear step toward a Baroque aesthetic (see Hojeda and Corcoran 1935).

Amarilis. “Epistola de Amarilis a Belardo.” In Poesía colonial hispanoamericana (siglos XVI–XVII). Edited by Mercedes Serna, 317–332. Madrid: Cátedra, 2004.
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Complete version of the poem is anthologized in this collection. In the tradition of Horace, the poem gives a few autobiographical details of the anonymous poet’s heritage as the daughter of conquistadors.
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Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel. “Gendered Voices from Lima and Mexico: Clarinda, Amarilis, and Sor Juana.” In Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America. Edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, 277–291. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
DOI: 10.1111/b.9781405112918.2005.00019.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Useful study of two of the female poets who were members of the Academia Antártica in Lima, Peru, with a comparison of their work with that of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She argues that the poets’ works represent “gendered poetic discourse” based on key verses in the poems that express that unique subjectivity in the context of a primarily masculine literary world.
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Cornejo Polar, Antonio, ed. Discurso en loor de la poesía: Estudio y edición. 2d ed. Lima, Peru, and Berkeley, CA: Centro de Estudios Literarios, 2000.
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Clarinda is the pen name used by the poet, assumed to be a creole woman born in the late 17th century in Peru. The poem praises the work of members of the Academia Antártica. In addition to its interest as one of the few poems attributed to a woman in this period, the poem also is considered one of the first poetic treatises of the Americas. This is an excellent critical edition.
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Hojeda, Diego de, and Mary H. P. Corcoran, eds. La Christiada: Fray Diego De Hojeda, O.P. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1935.
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Considered to be one of the first great religious epics written in the Americas, La Cristiada poeticizes the Passion of Christ in twelve cantos, each introduced by a royal octave. This classical structure gives way to verses in which intense ornamentation, use of continual antithesis, and vivid metaphors, indicate a clear tendency toward a Baroque aesthetic. The poem was celebrated by other members of the Academia and by Lope de Vega and Mira de Amescua.
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Oña, Pedro de, and José T. Medina, eds. Arauco Domado, de Pedro de Oña: Edición crítica de la Academia Chilena, Correspondiente de la Real Academia Española. Santiago de Chile, Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1917.
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Another example of the poetry of transition to the Baroque from the group of poets studying and working in the University of San Marcos of Lima. Several of the nineteen cantos reveal an original and imaginative rewriting of episodes from the conquest in the language of classical mythology and lyric, presented in a Counter-Reformation frame of reference to good and evil.
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Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. b. 1535–c. d. 1616) was a remarkable indigenous chronicler-historian who wrote an idiosyncratic history of the Andes and scathing critique of the Spanish colonial enterprise, composed of eight hundred pages of prose and four hundred full-page drawings (Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980 and Guaman Poma de Ayala 2009). The text displays many Baroque characteristics, despite being composed during the time of his more famous contemporary, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who used a decidedly Renaissance style. As Adorno 1986 and Adorno 2011 have shown, the author absorbed many influences from his time working closely with Spanish clergy and civil officials in Peru, including the rhetoric of sermons, proto-ethnographic descriptions of Andean customs and ritual practices used in the evangelization of indigenous people and the extirpation of idolatry, Castilian exemplary biographies, Renaissance dialogues found in economic and social reform treatises known as arbitrios, and religious and moral reflections known as consideraciones. By weaving these multiple genres into one, chaotic yet mesmerizing manuscript, written in Spanish with significant fusion of his native Quechua and the occasional Aymara, and illustrated with what sometimes appear to be European-inspired paintings and at others, pastoral scenes reproduced from Andean landscapes, Guaman Poma produces one of the most powerful expressions of desengaño (disillusionment and awakening to “reality”) of 17th-century Latin America. His constant lamentation, which echoes throughout the manuscript, that “the world is upside-down” thanks to the Spanish conquest and colonization, and to the way his own people reacted to the transformation of their society, voices his despair and provides readers with a chilling picture of the violence, hypocrisy, and corruption of early colonial society in the Andes and testifies to the power of the New World Baroque for the appropriation and hybridization of hegemonic discourses and their transformation into contestatory writing.

Adorno, Rolena. Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.
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A seminal study of Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica. Adorno briefly discusses the “Baroque sensibilities” that one finds in his text, especially given the Counter-Reformation’s emphasis on the didactic use of visual media and the author’s desire to persuade his reader, Phillip III, to make changes in his administration of Peru. She also explores the author’s concept of history, the ecclesiastical influences on his writing, and the use of satire.
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Adorno, Rolena. Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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Includes a concise overview of Guaman Poma’s text, his influences, and the Baroque characteristics of his writings and drawings. Adorno includes him in her chapter on the urban Baroque in Latin America, and links his critique of colonial society to the urban satirical writers Juan del Valle y Caviedes, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo, Juan Rodríguez Freile, and their sense of desengaño.
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Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. Nueva corónica y buen gobierno. 3 vols. Edited by Juan Murra and Rolena Adorno. Translated by George Urioste. Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1980.
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Well-regarded critical edition of the work, including an excellent introduction by the editors, and expert translations of the Quechua passages. Also includes copious notes on Andean cultural references, language usage, and other details of the text.
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Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. The First New Chronicle and Good Government: On the History of the World and the Incas up to 1615. Edited and translated by Roland Hamilton. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
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English translation of Nueva corónica y buen gobierno.
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Juan de Espinosa Medrano (“El Lunarejo”)

Juan de Espinosa Medrano (“El Lunarejo”) (b. c. 1629–d. 1688) was a renowned religious orator, poetry critic, and dramatist in 17th-century Peru. Chang-Rodríguez 1991 provides an overview of his life and the struggles with discrimination he experienced in his ecclesiastical career, most likely as a result of his mestizo, or possibly, indigenous heritage. The author also studies his drama Amar su propia muerte (see Espinosa Medrano 1972) as a Baroque hybrid that mixes an Old Testament story retold as a comedia de enredo (comedy of intrigue) in verses with abundant Gongorisms and Andean elements that concludes in a messianic, and potentially, subversive ending. He also wrote two autos sacramentales in Quechua, El hijo pródigo and El rapto de Proserpina y Sueño de Endimión. He is best known for his rigorous defense of Luis de Góngora’s poetics (see Espinosa Medrano 2005), in which he lays out one of the first New World poetic treatises, studied in González Echevarría 1993.

Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel. El discurso disidente: Ensayos de literatura colonial peruana. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1991.
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A collection of essays that takes the reader from the first versions of an Andean history to the flourishing of creole letters in the Peruvian viceroyalty. Her chapter on Juan de Espinosa Medrano (“El Lunarejo”) discusses his impressive biography, the complex context for mestizo (and indigenous) intellectuals in New World ecclesiastical careers, and his drama Amar su propia muerte as a Baroque play.
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Espinosa Medrano, Juan de. “Amar su propia muerte.” In Teatro hispanoamericano: Antología crítica (época colonial). Edited by Carlos Ripoll and Andrés Valdespino, 331–384. New York: Anaya, 1972.
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Accessible edition of his most widely read play with short introduction and a few explanatory notes.
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Espinosa Medrano, Juan de. Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora. Edición anotada de Luis Jaime Cisneros. Lima, Peru: Academia Peruana de la Lengua, Universidad de San Martín de Porres, 2005.
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Critical edition of the text, including introduction, notes, and a section-by-section commentary. Written by the bilingual cuzqueño in 1662 to defend Góngora from attacks by the Portuguese Manuel de Faria y Souza, the Apologética is an erudite treatise on Baroque poetry, unique in its quality and its origin from the “periphery of the periphery” of the metropolis.
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González Echevarría, Roberto. “Poetics and Modernity in Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Known as Lunarejo.” In Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature. By Roberto González Echevarría, 149–169. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
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A careful reading of Lunarejo’s Apologética that restores the often omitted passages from common early editions in an interpretation of his self-identification as a creole, his theory of Baroque poetics, and an appreciation of how he compares to his Baroque contemporaries.
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Juan del Valle y Caviedes

Born in Andalucia, Juan del Valle y Caviedes (b. 1646?–d. 1698) arrived in Lima as a young boy and spent the rest of his life there, acquiring the reputation as “Peru’s Quevedo” for his Baroque satirical poems, found in Caviedes 1984, a collection of his works. He also wrote other lyrical works on amorous, moral, and religious themes, all of which can be found in Caviedes 1990. Several short theatrical pieces have been attributed to him, as well. Johnson 1993 studies his work in relation to the development of the satirical writings from the beginning of the colonization through to the eve of independence. Lasarte 2006 provides an astute reading of his work and its viceregal social context, in comparison with an earlier Peruvian satirist and precursor of the Andean Baroque, Mateo Rosas de Oquendo (see Rosas de Óquendo 1990). The satirical critique of Lima society that marked Caviedes’s poetry can also be appreciated in the earlier prose piece by Juan Mogrovejo de la Cerda (?–1664), whose “La endiablada” (1626?) (see Mogrovejo de la Cerda 1991) exemplifies the Baroque sensibility of the transatlantic encounters common in viceregal Lima, studied by Chang-Rodríguez (1991). Often called the first fictional story of the Peruvian literary tradition, there are clear picaresque and celestinesque influences as well as the seeds of the costumbrismo (Costumbrist literature) that would become popular after Peruvian independence.

Caviedes, Juan del Valle. Obra completa. Edited by Daniel R. Reedy. Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1984.
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Another edition of his complete works with introductory essay, chronology of the poet’s life and his times, and critical bibliography prepared by one of his biographers and early scholars of his work.
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Caviedes, Juan del Valle. Obra completa. Edited by Maria Leticia Cáceres, Luis Jaime Cisneros, and Guillermo Lohmann Villena. Lima: Biblioteca Clásicos del Perú, 1990.
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An excellent resource for scholars, with a critical introduction, the poet’s complete works well edited from multiple manuscripts, and an annotated critical bibliography. Poems are arranged by genre. Includes theatrical pieces attributed to Caviedes.
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Johnson, Julie G. Satire in Colonial Spanish America: Turning the New World Upside Down. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
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Insightful and comprehensive study of satire, its Old World origins, and its role in the first three centuries of colonial Latin American literature. Chapters on Caviedes and Rosas de Oquendo explicate the two Baroque poets’ most important satirical pieces.
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Lasarte, Pedro. Lima satirizada (1598–1698): Mateo Rosas de Oquendo y Juan del Valle y Caviedes. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2006.
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Astute study of the two poets’ satirical works focusing on their critique of Lima’s viceregal society expressed through an innovative confluence of metropolitan literary traditions and creole appropriations and refashioning of the satirical-burlesque genres of poetry.
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Mogrovejo de la Cerda, Juan. “La endiablada.” In El discurso disidente: Ensayos de literatura colonial peruana. Edited by Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, 153–168. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1991.
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His most famous surviving work is this short, satirical story of two “devils,” one recently arrived to Peru and another who has lived there for some time, who meet in Lima and have a raucous conversation critiquing the hypocrisies and corrupt practices of Lima society. Chang-Rodríguez provides an annotated edition of the story as part of her analysis of Mogrovejo’s work.
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Rosas de Óquendo, Mateo. Sátira hecha por Mateo Rosas de Óquendo a las cosas que pasan en el Pirú, año de 1598. Edited by Pedro Lasarte. Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1990.
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Reliable and complete edition of the satirical works by Rosas de Oquendo, who was a soldier, encomendero in Tucumán, viceregal courtier in Lima, and poet. His poems are burlesque send-ups of Lima’s society as well as picaresque critiques of earlier heroic epic poetry like Ercilla’s La Araucana and express the desengaño (coming into social consciousness and understanding) that is characteristic of the Baroque works of the times.
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Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo

As prodigious and eclectic in his intellectual production as Mexico’s Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo (b. 1664–d. 1743) achieved fame during his lifetime as the “fénix americano” and the “monstruo de erudición” of 18th-century Peru for his more than sixty-four works that ranged from mathematics and astronomy to history, epic poetry, and opera (Slade and Williams 2009). In an excellent study of Peralta’s fascinating history of Spain as a crossroads of European and African conquests and its later emergence as an empire, Williams 2009 demonstrates how Peralta mixed late Baroque forms with neoclassicism to express a passionate criollismo, loyal to the empire, but that never fails to lament the limitations of his colonial subjectivity to his aspirations to universal intellectual glory. Peralta Barnuevo 1732 is Peralta’s follow-up epic poem that narrates the conquest of Peru up until his contemporary times. Peralta Barnuevo 1937 is an edition of his works of theater.

Peralta Barnuevo, Pedro de. Lima fundada: O conquista del Perú. Lima, Peru: Francisco Sobrino y Bados, 1732.
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Peralta followed up Historia de España vindicada with this epic poem, which brought the history of the conquest of Peru up to his contemporary times.
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Peralta Barnuevo, Pedro de. Obras dramáticas: Con un apéndice de poemas inéditos. Edited by Irving A. Leonard. Santiago de Chile, Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1937.
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Collection of Peralta’s theater, including comedias, loas, and entremeses, which have the mark of the late Baroque with elements of neoclassicism and the influence of French playwrights, whom he translated and adapted in some cases. Includes an introduction by the editor.
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Slade, David F., and Jerry M. Williams, eds. Bajo el Cielo Peruano: The Devout World of Peralta Barnuevo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
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Critical edition of two of Peralta’s important religious poems, “La Galeria de la Omnipotencia” and “Pasión y Triunfo de Christo.” The introduction highlights the ambiguities of the poet’s creole subjectivity in Bourbon Peru and his great theological erudition, which led to problems with Inquisitional censorship, but inspired this poetry.
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Williams, Jerry M. “Popularizing the Ethic of Conquest: Peralta Barnuevo’s Historia de España vindicada.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 412–441. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
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Williams shows how the work set out to define a more refined, didactic concept of history in the service of nation-building in the new context of the Bourbon dynasty in order to provide Peru with a history that could allow it a patriotism straddling both sides of the Atlantic.
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Other Baroques of the Americas

Several important New World Baroque writers lived outside of the viceregal capitals, yet displayed a keen awareness of artistic trends coming from Mexico City and Lima, as well as the peninsula. As Voigt 2009 has demonstrated in its study of creole and mestizo poets writing from mining towns Potosí and Minas Gerais, the Baroque aesthetic was often adopted by peripheral subjects of empire to help them negotiate power and earn prestige and acceptance. Silvestre de Balboa Troya Quesada is an early example from Cuba, whose Espejo de paciencia (1608) is considered one of the first New World epic poems to be marked by Baroque tendencies. Juan Rodríguez Freile’s El carnero o Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada (see Rodríguez Freile 1994) (1636–1638) is one of the great New World Baroque prose works, written from the then provincial city of Bogotá. A native of Santa Fe de Bogotá, Freile wrote this unique and fascinating chronicle of the first hundred years of the Nueveo Reino de Granada, present-day Colombia. The text gained notoriety as El carnero, most likely due to its popular circulation as a sheepskin-bound manuscript. Camacho Guizado 1998 provides a succinct analysis and appreciation of the “cases” or episodes of intrigue that Freile took from daily life and shaped into satirical critiques of colonial society. The satirical tone of his descriptions communicate a moralistic attitude toward the ecclesiastical and royal bureaucrats’ scandalous behavior, while at the same time entertaining the reader and providing a window onto aspects of early creole society often left out of other histories. Adorno 2011 calls attention to Freile’s possible inspiration from the Quijote and notes how the text can be considered “Baroque” in its attitude toward the telling of the micro-histories of greed and lust, abandoning the narrating of the “illusions” of great deeds and conquests from the earlier period. Rodríguez Freile 1961 is an accessible English translation of his work.

Adorno, Rolena. Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
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The section on Freile lays out a concise explication of the Baroque elements present in the text and locates El carnero in the satirical tradition of other urban Creole writers.
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Camacho Guizado, Eduardo. “Juan Rodríguez Freile.” In Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Tomo I, Época Colonial. Edited by Luis Íñigo Madrigal, 145–150. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1998.
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Camacho recognizes in the text the seed of Latin American novelistic writing, especially in Freile’s elaboration and picaresque embellishment of “cases” taken from his observations of daily life and his readings of the minutes from the Real Audiencia.
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Rodríguez Freile, Juan. The Conquest of New Granada. Translated by William C. Atkinson. London: Folio Society, 1961.
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Translation into English of El carnero (Rodríguez Freile 1994).
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Rodríguez Freile, Juan. El carnero o Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada. Santa Fe de Bogatá, Colombia: Panamericana Editorial, 1994.
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A recent edition of the classic work.
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Voigt, Lisa. “Spectacular Wealth: Baroque Festivals and Creole Consciousness in Colonial Mining Towns of Brazil and Peru.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 265–292. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
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This analysis of the periphery of the viceregal capitals focuses on the literary and festive renditions of the Baroque in the mining boom-towns, Potosí and Minas Gerais, tracing the creole identity formation at the center of ostensibly religious and imperial ceremonies and writings. Argues that the boasting of creole identity is as much a motivation as any religious or civic devotion might have been.
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Silvestre de Balboa Troya Quesada

Silvestre de Balboa Troya Quesada (b. 1563–d. 1647) wrote what is considered to be the first “literary” work composed in Cuba, the epic poem Espejo de paciencia (1608) (see Balboa 1962 and Balboa and Marrero-Fente 2010). Born and raised in the Canary Islands, Silvestre de Balboa moved to the eastern part of Cuba toward the end of the 16th century and became the official scribe of the Cabildo of Puerto Príncipe in the province of Camaguey. The poem, composed of only two cantos of hendecasyllables arranged in royal octaves, narrates the kidnapping of the bishop of Cuba, Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano, by Protestant pirates led by Gilberto Girón, and the subsequent rescue of the bishop by a local group of contrabandists turned heroes, and the eventual execution of Girón by a black man named Salvador. Though modeled on Renaissance epics, the poem has significant Baroque elements, and expresses a definite Counter-Reformation ideology and the ambivalence of many creole subjects loyal to the empire while struggling with local processes of identification. González Echevarría 1993 traces the poem’s history in Cuban letters as a celebrated foundational text despite its negligible poetic value. Cruz-Taura and Balboa 2009 and Marrero-Fente 2008 are two recent critical editions of the poem. Marrero-Fente 2008 is a book-length study of the poem from a transatlantic perspective. Duno Gottberg 2003 explores how racial ideology informs the canonization of the poem in Cuban literary culture.

Balboa, Silvestre, and Raúl Marrero-Fente. Espejo de paciencia. Madrid: Cátedra, 2010.
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Critical edition of the text by the author of a book-length study of the poem, Marrero-Fente 2008, whose convincing reading of the epic as an ideological tool that creates a fictive community of heroes rallying around a common purpose provides an excellent understanding of the importance of this foundational work in Cuba’s literary history.
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Balboa, Silvestre. Espejo de Paciencia. Edited by Cintio Vitier. La Habana, Cuba: Comisión Nacional Cubanade la Unesco, 1962.
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Until recently this facsimile edition was a widely used version of the poem, forming part of the nationalist project led by Vitier to reedit foundational texts for the “new” nation in the face of increased influence from the US media and popular culture. Includes a critical introduction and a glossary of Cuban expressions.
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Cruz-Taura, Graciella, and Silvestre Balboa. Espejo de paciencia y Silvestre De Balboa en la historia de Cuba. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009.
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Excellent critical edition of the text, with an expansive introductory essay on the poem’s history and place in Cuban historiography and literary culture. The poem is annotated with useful notes. Includes archival documents discovered by Cruz-Taura that bring new perspectives to the study of the poet, his historical context, and the poem.
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Duno Gottberg, Luis. Solventando las diferencias: La ideología del mestizaje en Cuba. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003.
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A chapter in this study explores how Espejo de paciencia is “discovered” at a time when anxiety about the potential for black slave revolt spread among the Cuban upper classes. Duno Gottberg argues that Balboa’s text offered an image of black and white fraternal “unity” in the face of foreign enemies and thus a model for nationhood useful for the preindependence Cuban intellectuals.
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González Echevarría, Roberto. “Reflections on the Espejo de paciencia.” In Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature. By Roberto González Echevarría, 128–148. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
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Informative explication of how the poem came to be a foundational text in the history of Cuban letters, from its “discovery” in 1838 by Romantic proto-nationalists, to its later reception by exiles from the colony, to its publication during the early republic, to its final consecration as a part of the national canon in the face of increased US media saturation of the island and the subsequent revolution.
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Marrero-Fente, Raúl. Epic, Empire, and Community in the Atlantic World: Silvestre De Balboa’s Espejo de Paciencia. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008.
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Insightful study of the poem and poet in the context of hemispheric studies, connections to earlier colonization of the Canary Islands, and the genre of epic poetry analyzed from a transatlantic perspective.
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The Neobaroque

After being marginalized by critics influenced by the Enlightenment and dedicated to the poetics of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Realism in the 18th and 19th centuries, the historical Baroque inspired renewed interest around the turn of the 20th century. As Zamora and Kaup 2010 (cited under Critical Approaches and Debates) traces in its introduction, a series of historical factors and literary coincidences joined to inspire a new generation of writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, devoted to Baroque aesthetics. The collection includes many of the most important examples of the early reconsiderations (from 1878 to 1940) of Baroque art and literature by European thinkers that would become the foundation for the theorization of the Neobaroque, including essays by Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Wölfflin, Walter Benjamin, Eugenio d’Ors, and essays by South American critics from the same period such as Alfonso Reyes, Ángel Guido, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Of course, poets also contributed to the renewal of the Baroque, from Rubén Darío’s modernist recuperation of the Spanish classics to the Generation of 27’s celebration of Luis de Góngora’s poetics, to the Mexican “los Contemporáneos,” to Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges. What all of these writers have in common, in their interest in the Baroque, is an acute inconformity with modernity and a desire to create alternative realities through words and images, while expressing a critique of the philosophical, political, and social concepts at the heart of the Enlightenment.

Critical Approaches and Debates

Most theorists of the Neobaroque work with this problematic relationship between the Baroque and modernity, which in the late 20th century evolved into a study of the relationship between the Neobaroque and postmodernism and late capitalism. Buci-Glucksmann 1994 traces how modern aesthetic theory emerged from the Baroque. Chiampi 2000 calls the Latin American Neobaroque an “aesthetic of countermodernity” given that the region was, in her opinion, never assimilated into the Enlightenment project. Kaup 2006 formulates a similar argument, but goes further to argue that the Neobaroque is a transhistoric “alternate modernity,” and thus the aesthetic found in many non-European contexts, especially in Latin America. Echeverría 1994 is a collection of essays edited by the important Ecuadorian-Mexican theorist of the Baroque who argues it be considered an “ethos,” that emerges during the crisis of modernity as a resistance to capitalism. The heart of New World Neobaroque theoretical and creative writing is found in the works by three Cuban intellectuals, each of whom will be treated separately in his own entry: Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy. In addition to their poetry and fiction, each developed important theoretical statements on the Baroque and Neobaroque. Salgado 1999 studies all three Cuban authors to show how hybridity is a crucial element in their theorization of Latin American Baroque culture, while Duno Gottberg 2003 devotes a chapter to each in its reconsideration of the ideology of mestizaje in their writings. Néstor Perlongher, whose writings were influenced by the Cuban poets as well as others in the modernist and avant-garde traditions, became an important innovator in Neobaroque poetics and social activist in Argentina and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s and represents yet another inflection of the Neobaroque in the Americas.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: SAGE, 1994.
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Translation of the “La Raison baroque,” the French philosopher’s argument that situates the advent of modern aesthetic theory in the historical Baroque. Working from Benjamin and Baudelaire, and drawing on poststructuralist theorists, especially Lacan, Buci-Glucksmann contributes to the late 20th-century theorization of the Baroque and Neobaroque undertaken by other French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Originally published as La Raison baroque (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1984).
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Chiampi, Irlemar. Barroco y modernidad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000.
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Brazilian critic Irlemar Chiampi argues in this important essay on the New World Baroque that Latin America could not be assimilated by the Enlightenment project and that for this very reason the Baroque is reappropriated by the region’s intellectuals in the early 20th century in order to invert modernity in what she calls the Neobaroque’s aesthetic of “dissonant modernity” (p. 17).
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Duno Gottberg, Luis. Solventando las diferencias: La ideología del mestizaje en Cuba. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003.
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Important study of the ideological uses of mestizaje in the nationalist discourses of Cuban literary history, from the 19th century to the beginnings of the revolution. Duno Gottberg examines the Neobaroque, as formulated by Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy, as a continuation of the ideology of mestizaje.
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Echeverría, Bolívar, ed. Modernidad, mestizaje cultural, ethos barroco. Mexico City: El Equilibrista, 1994.
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Collection of essays by leading critics addressing the relationship between the Baroque and modernity. Echeverría includes an essay that summarizes this polemic, which is further developed in the first essays of the volume. The three other sections are organized around the themes of cultural mestizaje, Baroque art and everyday life, and the Neobaroque and popular culture.
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Kaup, Monika. “Neobaroque: Latin America’s Alternative Modernity.” Comparative Literature 58.2 (Spring 2006): 128–152.
DOI: 10.1215/-58-2-128Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues for an understanding of the Latin American Neobaroque as an example of an “alternate modernity” based on its hybridity and its reliance on “Baroque reason” as a reaction to the crisis of Enlightenment rationality. Situated in “Global Modernity Studies,” Kaup provides a succinct summary of the most important theory on the Latin American Neobaroque and its critique of Eurocentric modernity, an excellent introduction to the most germane theoretical issues for graduate students and scholars.
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Salgado, César Augusto. “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory.” Journal of American Folklore 112.445 “Theorizing the Hybrid” (Summer 1999): 316–331.
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Astute analysis of the New World Baroque’s primary theorists’ understanding of hybridity in Latin America in their readings and writings on the colonial art forms as “instances of discontinuity” in relationship to European forms and therefore as critical dissent among the creole, mestizo, and indigenous artists redeploying the metropolitan discourses in the viceroyalties. Salgado brings postcolonial theories to bear on his study of José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, and Severo Sarduy, while also distinguishing the Hispanic Baroque and Neobaroque from the Anglo colonial and postcolonial contexts from which much of postcolonial contemporary theory emerged in the late 20th century.
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Zamora, Louise Parkinson, and Monika Kaup, eds. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
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This anthology represents the most complete collection of essays on the Baroque and Neobaroque available today, and includes translations of some of the seminal works from theorists and critics previously unavailable in English. They also introduce the foundational texts of the field with short, precise explanations of their significance and a brief genealogy of their ideas, including a critical bibliography on each piece.
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Alejo Carpentier

One of the earliest theorists of the Neobaroque in the Americas, the novelist, cultural historian, and ethnomusicologist Alejo Carpentier (b. 1904–d. 1980) famously said that “All symbiosis, all mestizaje, engenders the baroque.” Beginning with his first poems and his first novel, ¡Ecué-Yamba-Ó! (1928–1933) Carpentier explored the Afrocuban heritage that would later become part of his literary fusions of vanguardist tendencies. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (Carpentier 1995, originally published in 1975) reworks many of his theoretical ideas that first appeared in the prologue to his novel El reino de este mundo (Carpentier 1996, originally published in 1949), in which he first lays out his understanding of the relationship between mestizaje and the Baroque. That text, also included in his collection of essays that expands his approach to literature, Tientos y diferencias (Carpentier 1984, originally published in 1964), became the foundational statement on “lo real maravilloso,” often conflated with “magical realism” given their common progenitors influenced by Heinrich Wölfflin. For Carpentier, an early proponent of art critic Eugenio d’Ors’s theory that the Baroque is a constant that repeats itself throughout time as an “eternal return” and is not limited to the 17th century, Latin America and the Caribbean are essentially Baroque in their nature and cultural production due to the cultural mestizaje that underlies the region’s identity. Duno Gottberg 2003 devotes a chapter on the ideology of mestizaje in Cuban literary history to show how Carpentier extends the ideology of Fernando Ortiz’s transculturation to insert Cuba into universal history through his revalorization of the Baroque as cultural synthesis. González Echevarría 1993 continues his exploration of the Baroque continuities in Latin America with a reading of El siglo de las luces as Carpentier’s complex meditation on the writing of history in the Americas. Kaup 2005 reads Carpentier’s essays on the Neobaroque through a Deleuzian lens to argue for understanding the New World Baroque as a dynamic, creative “process of becoming-minor.”

Carpentier, Alejo. Tientos y diferencias. Barcelona: Plaza and Janés Editores, 1984.
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Originally published in 1964, this collection of essays includes Carpentier’s most important statements on the New World Baroque and the Latin American novel.
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Carpentier, Alejo. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, 89–108. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
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This is an English translation of Carpentier’s clarification and expansion of earlier writings, particularly those ideas about the Baroque found in the prologue to El reino de este mundo and other essays in Tientos y diferencias. Originally published in 1975.
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Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1996.
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Inspired by a vacation trip to Haiti in 1943, Carpentier revisits the period of Henri Christophe and the Haitian Revolution, creating a circular narrative structure that suggests that the recurrence of tyranny after liberation movements is inevitable. His innovative style, which he characterized as “lo real maravilloso” in the prologue to the novel, influenced many subsequent writers. First published in 1949.
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Duno Gottberg, Luis. Solventando las diferencias: La ideología del mestizaje en Cuba. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003.
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Important study of the ideological uses of mestizaje in the nationalist discourses of Cuban literary history, from the 19th century to the beginnings of the revolution. Includes a chapter on Carpentier in which Duno examines the ideological implications of the author’s notion of the Neobaroque as cultural synthesis.
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González Echevarría, Roberto. “Socrates among the Weeds: Blacks and History in Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces.” In Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature. By Roberto González Echevarría, 170–193. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
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The critic contemplates Carpentier’s contribution to the narrativization of history, specifically how the novelist brings Afrocaribbeans into history through multiple characters and perspectives in El siglo de las luces.
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Kaup, Monika. “Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier.” CR: The New Centennial Review 5.2 (2005): 107–149.
DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2005.0043Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Interprets Carpentier’s ideas from Deleuze’s notion of “becoming-minor” in order to argue that the Cuban understood the New World Baroque as a creative force that expressed a “counterconquest” in relation to hegemonic European forms, one which represents a minority appropriating the majority’s language and transforming it for their own purposes.
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Carpentier’s Major Novels

In addition to his theoretical and ethnographic writings, Carpentier was a prolific novelist. His major novels, in addition to El reino de este mundo (see Carpentier 1984, cited under Alejo Carpentier), include El siglo de las luces (Carpentier 1962), translated into English as Explosion in a Cathedral (Carpentier 2001), Los pasos perdidos (Carpentier and González Echevarría 1985, first published in 1953), translated into English as The Lost Steps (Carpentier 1967), and Concierto barroco (Carpentier 1974), which was one of his last novels. Carpentier 1983 is a collection of his complete works.

Carpentier, Alejo. El Siglo De Las Luces: Novela. Mexico City: Cía. General de Ediciones, 1962.
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Historical novel that depicts a revolutionary pirate in Guadalupe who fights against the English during the French Revolution.
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Carpentier, Alejo. The Lost Steps. Translated by Harriet de Onis. 2d ed. New York: Knopf, 1967.
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English translation of Los pasos perdidos, with an introduction by J. B. Priestley.
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Carpentier, Alejo. Concierto Barroco: Novela. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1974.
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One of his last novels whose plot is based on the imagined encounter of Europe and America in the staging of Antonio Vivaldi’s Baroque opera Montezuma.
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Carpentier, Alejo. Obras Completas. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1983.
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The author’s complete works, including his novels, essays, lectures, and chronicles.
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Carpentier, Alejo. Explosion in a Cathedral. Translated by John Sturrock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
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Translation of El siglo de las luces (Carpentier 1962), with a brief introduction by Timothy Brennan.
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Carpentier, Alejo, and Roberto González Echevarría, eds. Los Pasos Perdidos. Madrid: Cátedra, 1985.
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Critical edition of the novel originally published in 1953. Inspired by his travels in Venezuela and his work as an ethnomusicologist, this existentialist novel takes the form of a diary of a Cuban musician and intellectual who seeks to escape civilization by traveling to a remote Amazon village in search of native musical instruments.
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José Lezama Lima

The poet, essayist, and novelist Lezama Lima (b. 1910–d. 1976) wrote one of the most important essays on the New World Baroque, La expresión americana (first given as series of lectures at the University of Havana in the mid-1950s, then published in 1957) (see Lezama Lima 1969). In it he locates the origins of Latin American identity in the historical Baroque of the 17th century, highlighting its creative force, its “Plutonism, an originary fire that tears apart the fragments as well as unifies them.” Paradiso is Lezama Lima’s most complex and ambitious project, a novel that epitomizes the Neobaroque aesthetic and use of language. Lezama Lima 1996 is a critical edition of the novel that includes multiple studies of the text and author. Lezama Lima 1974 is an excellent translation into English of this challenging novel. Salgado 2001 explores modernism’s intertextuality found in the writings of Lezama Lima and James Joyce.

Lezama Lima, José. La expresión americana. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1969.
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Edited volume of the author’s lectures delivered in Havana in the mid-1950s. The chapter “La curiosidad barroca” discusses his ideas about the New World Baroque as an “assimilating oven” constructed by lettered “señores barrocos” producing “baroque banquets,” all metaphors for the cultural mestizaje he sees as the heart of Latin America’s foundational identity, one that expresses in its essence a “contraconquista” that evolves into the cultural autonomy of the Neobaroque (pp. 89–120). Originally published in 1957.
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Lezama Lima, José. Paradiso. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.
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English translation of the novel, Paradiso.
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Lezama Lima, José. Paradiso. Edited by Cintio Vitier. Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1996.
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Considered Lezama Lima’s Neobaroque masterpiece, Paradiso which was published in 1966 tells the story of a young man suffering from a mysterious illness, the loss of his father, and his struggle with accepting his homosexuality in pre-Castro Cuba. This edition of the text, meticulously prepared by Cintio Vitier, includes a selection of critical essays, bibliography, glossary, and notes. Originally published in 1966.
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Salgado, César A. From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001.
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Through a comparative study of José Lezama Lima and James Joyce, Salgado reconsiders the aesthetics of European modernism and contemporary Latin American Neobaroque literature. Given the influence of Joyce on Latin American writers, this is an important look at the intertextuality that leads to interesting new perspectives on how we understand modernism and its relationship to 20th-century Latin American writers.
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Severo Sarduy

Exiled in France in 1959 after receiving a scholarship to study art history, Severo Sarduy (b. 1937–d. 1993) falls into the Tel Quel intellectual circle and interacted frequently with Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva and read Lacan and Derridá. His work is marked by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, a keen interest in science, and a fascination with the Baroque. The essay Sarduy 1999 expresses his primary theoretical ideas about the Neobaroque, which differ significantly from Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima in Sarduy’s rejection of the Baroque as cultural synthesis in a nationalist project. Instead, Sarduy tends to appreciate the Neobaroque in primarily semiotic terms, foregrounding the artifice as the quintessential element of Baroque aesthetics. The contingency of the linguistic artifice speaks to the disruptive, unstable nature of the Neobaroque, as Sarduy conceives it. González Echevarría 1993 interprets Sarduy’s celebrated novel, Cobra (Sarduy 1972), while providing a clear contrast between Sarduy’s Baroque poetics and that of his countryman Lezama Lima. Sarduy’s essay on Kepler in Sarduy 1974 discusses how Baroque painters’ incorporation of the ellipse as a decentering technique reflected a modern mentality, while connecting those techniques to Luis de Góngora’s equally transgressive poetics. Sarduy 1989 is a book of short, varied meditations on writing, aesthetics, and the erotic. Sarduy 1993 and Sarduy and Levine 1995 are representative novels that reflect his aesthetic philosophy.

González Echevarría, Roberto. “Plain Song: Sarduy’s Cobra.” In Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature. By Roberto González Echevarría, 212–238. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
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The concluding essay of his journey through Baroque and Neobaroque works, González Echevarría not only offers a compelling reading of Sarduy’s most challenging novel, but also contrasts Sarduy’s conception of the Baroque with that of Lezama Lima’s.
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Sarduy, Severo. Cobra. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Sudamericana, 1972.
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A novel that explores the life and transformations of a transvestite named Cobra, who is obsessed with transforming his body, along with his friends, a madam of the “theatre” in which he works and his dwarf double, Pup.
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Sarduy, Severo. Barroco. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Sudamericana, 1974.
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Sarduy’s theoretical formulation of the Baroque and Neobaroque includes his essay on Johannes Kepler and the displacement of the circle with the ellipse as a central idea of Baroque scientific thought, providing the primary metaphor of the decentering at the heart of his conception of the Neobaroque, which he interprets as analogous to repression and projection and the distortions of unconscious thought as theorized by Lacan.
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Sarduy, Severo. Written on a Body. Translated by Carol Maier. New York: Lumen, 1989.
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Translation of Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Sudamericana, 1969). Includes a section from La simulación (Caracas, Venezuela: Monte Avila Editores, 1982). A variety of short essays and impressions, many on contemporary Latin American writers and their fiction, as well as reflections on the Baroque.
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Sarduy, Severo. De donde son los cantantes. Edited by Roberto González Echevarría. Madrid: Cátedra Letras Hispanas, 1993.
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A carnivalesque and experimental novel, first published in 1980, that represents, by way of multiple characters, Sarduy’s understanding of Cuban identity not as a cultural synthesis of the three dominant ethnic traditions he represents, Spanish, African, and Chinese, but as a complex coexistence of difference.
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Sarduy, Severo. “El Barroco y el Neobarroco.” In Obra completa. Vol. 2. Edited by Gustavo Guerrero and Francois Wahl, 1385–1404. Paris: ALLCA XX, 1999.
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Essay in which Sarduy sets out his conceptualization of the Neobaroque as primarily an aesthetic of artifice and linguistic ingenuity.
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Sarduy, Severo, and Suzanne J. Levine, trans. Cobra and Maitreya. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1995.
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English translations of Sarduy’s novels Cobra and Maitreya, both complex narratives of personal transformation.
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Néstor Perlongher (b. 1949–d. 1992)

Born in Argentina and exiled to Sao Paulo, Néstor Perlongher was a poet, activist, and anthropologist whose work treated themes as varied as dictatorship, social marginality, homosexuality, transvestism, sex work, exile, esoteric rituals, and national identity. Influenced by modernist, avant-garde, and Neobaroque poets, he developed a style shared with other poets of the River Plate region he called “Neo-Barroso,” in reference to the muddy river at the border of his country. Echavarren, et al. 1996 is an anthology of poetry that includes many of Perlongher’s contemporaries, along with a selection of his work. Perlongher 1997a is a collection of the complete works of poetry that he had published in a half dozen separate books of poetry from 1980 to 1992, the year of his death. Perlongher 1997b is a collection of essays he had written in the same period as his poetry, and includes several pieces on NeoBaroque aesthetics and poetry, in addition to journalistic writings and chronicles. Perlongher 1993 is an anthropological study of male prostitution in Sao Paulo, where he had completed a master’s degree in social anthropology. Bollig 2008, the first monograph in English to treat Perlongher’s work, is a comprehensive study of his poetry and essays. Flores 2011 focuses on Perlongher’s involvement, later in his life, in the ecstatic rituals with ayahuasca and the ritual’s relationship to Baroque aesthetics. Montes 2010 explores the relationship between modernist poetry and Perlangher’s carnivalesque rewritings of modernismo.

Bollig, Ben. Néstor Perlongher: The Poetic Search for an Argentine Marginal Voice. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2008.
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The first book-length study in English of Perlongher’s work. This comprehensive approach to the poet includes chapters on his politics and prose, his relationship with the poetic tradition, his conception of the Baroque, issues of national identity, feminism, sexuality, transvestism, and mysticism.
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Echavarren, Roberto, José Kozer, and Jacobo Sefamí, eds. Medusario: Muestra de poesía latinoamericana. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996.
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Collection of Neobaroque poetry from the last third of the 20th century. Includes a good introductory prologue.
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Flores, Enrique. “Chamanismo y neobarroso: Poética de la ayahuasca.” Revista Laboratorio 5 (2011).
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Interesting discussion of Perlongher’s fascination with and participation in the ayahuasca ritual in the Brazilian esoteric group Santo Daime. Compares the ritual’s participant’s experience to mystics’ ecstatic experiences and draws a relationship to Baroque aesthetics.
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Montes, Alicia. “Camp neobarroco: Homenaje, artificio, violencia.” Confluenze 1.2 (2010): 99–111.
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Studies the “carnivalization” of modernist poetic forms in Perlongher’s poetry as a violent homage that transforms language, divorcing it from any mimetic functionality and foregrounding the counterdiscursive, corporal, playful, erotic, and campy power of the signifier. The essay also treats the prose work of Perlongher’s contemporary, Copi.
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Perlongher, Néstor. La prostitución masculina. Buenos Aires, Argentina: La Urraca, 1993.
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Anthropological study of male prostitution in Sao Paulo, resulting from Perlongher’s studies in social anthropology and his activist commitment to marginal urban subjects.
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Perlongher, Néstor. Poemas completos (1980–1992). Edited by Roberto Echavarren. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Seix Barral, 1997a.
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A collection of his complete poetic works. Includes his most famous poem, “Cadaveres,” a daring and powerful denouncement of the “dirty war” perpetrated by the dictatorship in Argentina in the 1970s.
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Perlongher, Néstor. Prosa plebeya: Ensayos (1980–1992). Edited by Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Baigorria. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Colihue, 1997b.
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Collection of his academic essays, chronicles, and journalistic writings which reflect his thinking on many social and literary issues, influenced by Bataille, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Sarduy, among others. Includes a foreword by the editors.
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