Parallel with the mythological vogue in contemporary art, late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century European literature virtually overflowed with texts based on the narrative treasurehouse of ancient mythology. After more than a millenium, poems and plays swarmed again with lascivious gods and death-defying heroes; burning desires and violent deaths; paederasty and incest; adultery, rape, and murder. With very few exceptions all the greatest authors of the day dedicated themselves to mythological pursuits, creating some of the most astonishing and significant but also hermetic works ever to have been written in the European languages. Indeed, this literary trend was both so consistent and so extensive that we may speak of a virtual early modern "mythological literature": a wide-branched organism of generically varied literary variations on the Ovidian fables. The book Diglossia. The Early Modern Reinvention of Mythological Discourse aims to answer the basic research questions: "Why did this mythological literature arise at this particular time?" and "What are its constants and variants?"

CONTENTS

MYTH

I. Mythological Literature – Topic, Theory, Method

The Topic — The Scholarship — This Book — A Cartography of Myth — The Map and the World

II. The Discourse of Myth – Antiquity, Middles Ages, Early Modern Period

The Beginning — The Phaedrus — Pagan Mythography after Plato — Christian Era — Early Modern Spain

DESIRE

I. Obscure Configurations of Desire – The Baroque Mythological Sonnet

Baroque Lyric and Myth — The Spanish Love Sonnet — Three Examples — Antinomies of Baroque Desire

II. Eros in Various Attires – Quevedo’s Hero and Leander Poems

Recurrence of a Myth — Quevedo’s Transformation of the Sonnet Genre — Myth of Love, Allegory of Lust — Ambiguous Figures of Desire

FICTION

I. Mirror of Myth – The Baroque Epyllion

The Baroque Mythological ‘Fable’ — A Controversial Genre — The Opinion of the Theorists — Fiction, Image, and Myth in the Baroque

II. A Monstruous Tale – Mosaical Mythography in Góngora’s Polifemo

Tradition and the Individual Work — The Polifemo, Epitome of the Genre — A Beautiful, Self-Reflective Beast — Poetic Mosaic

TRAGEDY

I. Ambiguous Allegories – The Baroque Mythological Comedia

The Double Bind — The Serious Comedia — Myth and Tragedy — Ambiguity Brought into Play — Culture of Crisis and Tragic Taboo

II. The Trappings of Woe – Myth, Tragedy, and Allegory in Calderón’s Eco y Narciso

Dramatic Amphibology — Echoes and Reflections — Tragedy à la Calderoniana — Fatality and Jokes — Profane Truth and Transcendental Illusion — The ‘Comic Tragedy’ in Context

LITERATURE

I. The Modern Turn – Beyond Desire, Fiction, and Tragedy

Parodic, Heroicomic, Jocoserious, Burlesque Myth — The Question of Modernity — Birth of the Literary Institution

II. The Promised Land of Letters – A European Perspective

An Aetiology of Diglossia: Venus and Adonis — Excursus to Andalucia — The Aporia of Myth: Amor and Psyche — Another Precarious Issue