Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Labyrinthine Baroque
- 2 The Female Baroque
- 3 Catholic Female Baroque
- 4 Protestant Baroque
- 5 The Female Baroque in Court and Country
- 6 Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
- 7 From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
- Postscript
- About the Author
- Index
1 - The Labyrinthine Baroque
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction and Acknowledgements
- 1 The Labyrinthine Baroque
- 2 The Female Baroque
- 3 Catholic Female Baroque
- 4 Protestant Baroque
- 5 The Female Baroque in Court and Country
- 6 Lady Mary Wroth: The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus
- 7 From Baroque to Enlightenment: Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
- Postscript
- About the Author
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter surveys current theories of the Baroque, distinguishing between those that see it historically and those that view it as a recurring stylistic quirk. I draw particularly on Jose Antonio Maravall to advance a schema of recurring Baroque characteristics – fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch and plateauing. Some concepts will seem unfamiliar to scholars used to considering the Baroque as primarily concerned with music, painting or sculpture, or inextricably connected with the Counter-Reformation. These concepts are concerned less with the surface characteristics of the period's culture and more with underlying ideological trends. I also ask how we can speak of the ‘English’ Baroque, since it has long seemed an alien concept to the residual tradition of English literary and cultural history.
Key words: Theories of the Baroque; hyperbole, melancholy, English Baroque; early modern women writers
The baroque revolution … a continuous state of budding emergence, alluring and infectious … a prodigious subjective space is being built.
— Julia KristevaThe concept of the Baroque is notoriously difficult – or, perhaps the same thing, too easy – to define. A long-standing problem in early modern studies is the attempt to elucidate its ‘inherent slipperiness’, a goal, I have discovered, that is as compulsive as it is illusory. After over 150 years of sometimes irascible controversy, and especially after the definitive studies in the late nineteenth century by the German scholar Heinrich Wolfflin, the term is still used haphazardly in popular lexicon: there are Baroque colours, remarks, fashion, even Baroque ice cream; in more scholarly contexts it is used to describe both a style and a period, to delineate both individual subject positions and shared ideologies; it is usually connected with music, art, architecture, although (at least in Anglo-American scholarship) less with literature, and somewhat infrequently with writing specifically in English.
The origin of the term is obscure but much speculated about; it is conventionally related to the Spanish barrueco, an irregular pearl, but it has increasingly acquired a multiplicity of other alleged origins, predominantly derived from the history of art and architecture, frequently pejorative, often suggesting perversity, anachronism, bizarreness, unpredictability, individuality, irrationality, rebellion, theatricality, ornamentation, or oddity, and even simply bad taste, particularly in reaction to classical reason and constraint.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary CultureFrom Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, pp. 17 - 46Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020