Revisiting Baroque Poetics in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s <em>Peregrinação</em>: The Hermeneutics of Worldview
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.
Published
2014-05-03
Issue
Section
Special Dossier
Copyright (c) 2014 Catarina Fouto
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.