The Melancholy Void

"Felipe Valencia has written a remarkable book, a wide-ranging study of early modern poetry, in the manner of Leah Middlebrook (Imperial Lyric, Pennsylvania State UP, 2009) and Isabel Torres (Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, Tamesis 2013), but with a focus on the turn of the seventeenth century."—Ignacio Navarrete, Bulletin of the Comediantes
"The Melancholy Void offers a valuable contribution to studies of early modern literary theory and our understanding of the evolution of Spanish lyric poetry in relation to extratextual phenomena. . . . The author deftly balances breadth and depth to deliver a fascinating history of Spanish lyric and of the gendered nature of poetic genres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."—Katherine L. Brown, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
"Just for the wealth of lyric literary history discussed, Valencia's monograph is a valuable reference for students of early-modern Spain. The book convincingly demonstrates the links between lyric expression, melancholic subjectivity, and gender violence in early-modern lyric poetry. Its denunciation of gender violence in early-modern poetry helps open the door to necessary but difficult discussions about the harmful legacies of arch-canonical poets and the lyric poetic tradition more generally. The study of early-modern poetry in Spain will no doubt be better off for having the reckoning with gender violence proposed by The Melancholy Void."—Luis Rodríguez-Rincón, Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry
"One of the most daring intellectual contributions of the book: the denunciation not only of a masculinist imaginary, but of an authentic rape culture in early modern Spain and, what would be even more shocking, in the scholarly interpretation and commentary of the poetic texts of this period by the greater part of modern and contemporary academia on both sides of the Atlantic."—Simón A. Villegas, Creneida: Journal of Hispanic Literatures
"The Melancholy Void presents a trove of interpretive and scholarly riches . . . this book represents an important addition to the study of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century poetry. It will, no doubt, provides much food for thought and debate."—María Cristina Quintero, Hispanic Review
"The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora provides valuable critical insights into literary theory, the concept of melancholy, and masculine versus feminine violence as focal points of Ealy Modern Spanish literature."—Salvatore Poeta, Hispania
"[The Melancholy Void is] a powerful and excellent study that suggests a viable route to see beyond longstanding critical approaches to the history and theory of la nueva poesía in early modern Spain and, more broadly, the history and theory of lyric poetry."—Andrés Olmedo Orejuela, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
“This is a terrific piece of scholarship that delves into the period of one of Spain’s most important authors, Luis de Góngora. Felipe Valencia offers a fascinating genealogy of the lyric tradition, grounding it in a dazzling array of deep readings of primary texts, together with an insightful application of theoretical and critical secondary material.”—Mary B. Quinn, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico
“An innovative way of looking at this important corpus of texts, shedding new light on crucial matters such as the ties between poetics, philosophy, affect, and rhetoric. The astute interlacement between poetic theory and melancholy as a way of understanding the masculine rhetoric present in the texts studied is convincing and insightful.”—Rodrigo Cacho, faculty of modern and medieval languages at the University of Cambridge