Revisiting Baroque Poetics in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s <em>Peregrinação</em>: The Hermeneutics of Worldview

  • Catarina Fouto King's College London
Keywords: critical semantics, generic hybridity, polyphony,  spectacle

Abstract

This paper explores the Baroque poetics of Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinação. Drawing from Roland Greene’s Five Words, it argues that the shift in worldview that occurred between the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century played a crucial role in the development of Baroque poetics, style and commonplaces, and, crucially, that these should be seen as powerful hermeneutic tools. Whilst addressing the critical debate surrounding certain features of the Peregrinação, this paper focuses on questions of generic hybridity, encoded polyphony, and spectacle from a multidisciplinary approach. Through a close reading of certain episodes of the Peregrinação, this paper highlights the discursive power of this text in problematizing and disrupting stable views of the world and the moral and cultural superiority of the Portuguese and their imperial aspirations.

Author Biography

Catarina Fouto, King's College London
Catarina Barceló Fouto holds the post of Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at King’s College—London (2011). Her research and teaching interests include the study of medieval and early-modern Portuguese texts (in Portuguese, Spanish and Latin) and culture. She is the co-editor of a special number of the Hispanic Research Journal (“Negotiating Power in the Literatures of the Iberian Inquisitions: Courts, Crowns and Creeds”), and of the forthcoming volume, The Reinvention of Theatre in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Traditions, Texts and Performance (Legenda). Amongst others, she has published and presented papers on António Ferreira, Sá de Miranda, Camões, Diogo de Teive and André de Resende. Her survey of Portuguese Neo-Latin literature and of “Anti-Erasmianism in Portugal” will appear, respectively, in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin and Dicionário dos Antis: A Cultura Portuguesa em Negativo.
Published
2014-05-03
Section
Special Dossier