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Notes
1 The interplay between the imagination and reality (construed in terms of the connections between consciousness and the world) was an obsessive concern of the American poet Wallace Stevens. The verse, ‘I am the necessary angel of the earth, / Since, in my sight, you see the world again', was included by Stevens as an epigraph on the flyleaf of his volume, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination by Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951). The lines are taken from the poem ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans', from the anthology The Auroras of Autumn (1950) in which the imagination conjures up a personification of reality as an angel whose introduction to one of the countrymen opens: ‘I am the angel of reality, / Seen for the moment standing in the door' (see Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose [New York: Library of America, 1966], 638).
2 The philosopher Richard Kearney's study The Wake of Imagination: Towards a Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1988) is a case in point. Kearney's study investigates the imagination as moving through three paradigms in the history of the Western intellectual tradition. Notwithstanding his own caveats around the ‘flexible hermeneutic' applied (‘heuristic guideline rather than historicist dogma’), and his insistence on history as ‘an open-ended drama of narratives' (The Wake of Imagination, 19–20), it is his paradigmatic organization that has prevailed and been adapted by subsequent readers.
3 The quotation is taken from Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy and concludes a section in which he extolls the best poet as the one who follows ‘the course of his own invention’. Imagination makes the poet: ‘where all other arts retain themselves within their own subject and receive, as it were, their being from it, the poet only bringeth his own stuff, and doth not learn a conceit out of matter, but maketh matter for a conceit' (see The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed., with an intro. & notes, by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2002), 213–50 (pp. 218 and 232).
4 Kearney refers to the risks of viewing the imagination as an ‘ineluctably developing essence rising to its golden maturity in the modern era and declining rapidly ever since' (The Wake of Imagination, 19), though there is some tension between this and his interrogation of the imminent demise of the imagination from which comes the title of his book.
5 See Matthew M. Maguire, The Conversion of the Imagination: From Pascal through Rousseau to Tocqueville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 2006), 15.
6 The end of the postmodern era is suggested by the emergence of retrospective exhibitions such as Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from 24 September 2011 to 15 January, 2012.
7 For Fredric Jameson four losses are symptomatic of postmodernism: suppression of subjective inwardness; referential depth, historical time and coherent human expression (see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1991).
8 See Timothy J. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1997), 16, for his working definition of the term ‘fictive imagination'.
9 Scholarship on the modern imagination is vast. Key examples of single-authored contributions include: Mary Warnock, Imagination (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978); James Engell, The Creative Imagination: From Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1981); Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991); J. M. Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas, ed., with an intro., by Penelope Murray (London/New York: Routledge, 1994); John Sallis, Force of the Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 2000).
10 Jacques Derrida engages with the legacy of Babel in ‘Des Tours de Babel', trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed., with an intro., by Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1985), 165–248 (p. 171). According to his reading, the destruction of the tower and a single language resulted in the impossibility of reconstructing either, henceforth the plurality of languages and a confusing multiplicity of meanings.
11 Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination, xvi.
12 Isabel Torres offers a brief consideration of the polyvocality of Plato's writings for our understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of his practice that tend to generate unresolved contradictions. Just like the work of the poets he would ban from the Republic, Plato's images often mobilize readers both rationally and affectively, thereby opening a space for the individualistic free-thinking he most distrusts (see Isabel Torres, ‘Moving in … Garcilaso's “Dulces prendas por mi mal halladas” ', in Spanish Golden Age Poetry in Motion: The Dynamics of Creation and Conversation, ed. Jean Andrews & Isabel Torres (Woodbridge/Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2014), 41–58 (pp. 41–43).
13 See Dan Flory, ‘Stoic Psychology, Classical Rhetoric, and Theories of Imagination in Western Philosophy', Philosophy and Rhetoric, 29:2 (1996), 147–67 (p. 147).
14 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including the Letters, ed., with an intro. & prefatory notes, by Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1973), 1153–211; Plato, The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951).
15 According to the philosophy of mimesis most explicitly outlined in the Republic, the world around us is an inferior copy, a shadow world, of the ideal world of forms; literature, which imitates the appearance of our world, is therefore a bad copy of a bad copy, and so is twice removed from truth (see Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. by C. D. C. Reeve, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992).
16 The myth of Err, the culminating allegory of the soul, is arguably Plato's most powerfully poetic passage (Plato, Republic, trans. Grube, 614b ff).
17 Interestingly recent advances in cognitive science suggest that rational thought is more imaginative than we have believed. This is the basis of Ruth M. J. Byrne's ground-breaking study, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
18 This is not to suggest that Plato's ‘afterlives' are not varied in content and objectives, for one need only compare Wordsworth and Nietzsche. The former finds in Plato a power of poetic imagination that could be made ethical, the latter identifies in Plato a dawning of decadence that would last two millennia. As illustrative, see William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads', in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed., with an intro., by Duncan Wu, 4th ed. (Chichester/Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 506–17 (esp. p. 507), and Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans., with an intro. & commentary, by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 14. But the general thrust of Plato's thinking on the imagination, as expressed at the primary level of the narration, is rarely disputed, whereas scholars have long debated the import of the Aristotelian definition.
19 For instance, De insomniis, 460b28-29 and 462a8-9; Analytica posteriora, II.19 and Metaphysica 980b25-2: See On Dreams, trans. J. I. Beare, Posterior Analytics, trans. Jonathan Barnes, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1984), I, 729–35, I, 114–66 and II, 1552–728 respectively.
20 See Michael V. Wedin, Mind and Imagination in Aristotle (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1988), esp. Chapter 2, ‘The Canonical Theory of Imagination', 23–63. Wedin proposes a cognitivist/functionalist interpretation which is remarkable for two key notions: (1) that most commentators are mistaken in following Aquinas in taking the broader ‘canonical text’ to contain Aristotle's central thesis (i.e. imagination is identified with a movement resulting from sense perception), which is not actually asserted until a little further on; (2) that although the imagination has cognitive capability, it is functionally incomplete, and therefore not in itself a ‘discriminative faculty' (48), but rather subserves other faculties and occurs in the course of another faculty's operation (45–51).
21 Scholars continue to dispute whether the common translation of ‘phantasia' as ‘imagination' actually makes sense in the light of Aristotle's arguments. For a brief consideration of this issue, see Victor Caston, ‘Why Aristotle Needs Imagination', Phronesis, 41:1 (1996), 20–55 (pp. 20–22). José María Pozuelo Yvancos notes that in Classical Latin literature ‘imaginatio' is the accepted translation of the Greek ‘phantasia', so it is not surprising that Early Modern Spanish texts use ‘fantasía' and ‘imaginación' interchangeably, as there is an almost total coincidence of meaning (see José María Pozuelo Yvancos, La invención literaria: Garcilaso, Góngora, Cervantes, Quevedo y Gracián [Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 2014], 41).
22 De anima, 428b10–17; 428b30–429a1. See On the Soul, trans. J. A. Smith, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Barnes, I, 641–92.
23 Caston, ‘Why Aristotle Needs Imagination', 20: ‘The chapter's serpentine argument nowhere announces its motives in a straightforward way'. For D. W. Hamlyn, the problem lies in Aristotle's lack of clarity about the status of the imagination: ‘an unsatisfactory halfway status between perception and the intellect' (see D. W. Hamlyn, ‘Introduction', in Aristotle's ‘De anima', Books II and III, trans., with intro. & notes, by D. W. Hamlyn [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968], ix–xvi [p. xiv]). However, Martha Nussbaum urges caution, referring to the ‘unusually corrupt' nature of the De anima text, especially Book 3 (see Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Introduction: A. The Text of Aristotle's De anima’, in Essays on Aristotle's ‘De anima', ed. Martha C. Nussbaum & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], 1–6 [p. 2]).
24 See Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ‘Introduction: B. De anima: Its Agenda and Its Recent Interpreters', in Essays on Aristotle's ‘De anima', ed. Nussbaum & Oksenberg Rorty, 7–14 (p. 13).
25 Among prominent new historicists Louis Montrose was instrumental in urging the reader to see the text within a continuous process of mediation. His most quoted phrase recognizes ‘the historicity of texts and the textuality of history' (see Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History', English Literary Renaissance, 16:1 [1986], 5–12 [p. 8]). Of course, as Virginia Mason Vaughan has pointed out, what was ‘strikingly “new” practice in the 1980s' had already become ‘common practice' by the beginning of the twenty-first century (see Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicism', in Modern North American Criticism and Theory: A Critical Guide, ed. Julian Wolfrys [Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 2006], 103–09 [p. 109]).
26 The quotation is taken from Walter Pater, ‘The Marbles of ÆӔgina', in Greek Studies: A Series of Essays by Walter Pater, prepared for the press by Charles L. Shadwell (London: MacMillan & Co., 1901), 266–85 (p. 267; emphasis added). The essay first appeared in Fortnightly Review in April, 1880.
27 See, for instance, Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (London: MacMillan & Co., 1909), 274–76.
28 See Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art As Technique', in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 17–23 (p. 18).
29 See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed., with an intro., by George G. Watson (London: Dent, 1975). For reference to defamiliarization as a form of intensified, original, perception, see p. 49.
30 See Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry', in The Major Works, ed., with an intro. & notes, by Zachary Leader & Michael O'Neill (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2003), 674–701.
31 Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry', 676, 698.
32 See, for instance, Coleridge, Biographia literaria, ed. Watson, I. 263, where he states that his ‘system' is that of ‘Pythagoras and of Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures'; and Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry', 677: ‘A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one'.
33 See Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Liber De Imaginatione/On the Imagination, Latin text with an intro., an English trans. & notes by Harry Caplan (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1930); the soul transcends the flesh, high above the whirl of phantasms, in the ‘lofty watch-tower of the intellect' (85).
34 See Juan Luis Vives, De anima et vita, in Opera omnia, ed. Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, 8 vols (Valencia: Montford, 1782–90; repr. London: Gregg Press, 1964), III, 300–514. Written in 1538, the De anima et vita is one of Vives' works that was not translated into vernacular languages.
35 See Mary E. Barnard's chapter, ‘Eros at Material Sites', which includes insightful analysis of a key metaphor in Garcilaso's Sonnet V (the woman as a garment covering the subject's soul) as an eroticized reimagining of a passage from Hugh of St Victor: Mary E. Barnard, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2014), 125–51 (pp. 150–51).
36 The fluctuating fortunes of imagination/appetite and reason, and the impact on the poetic subject are captured in the stanza that opens: ‘No reina siempre aquesta fantasía, / que en imaginación tan variable / no se reposa un hora el pensamiento: viene con un rigor tan intratable / a tiempos el dolor que al alma mía / desampara, huyendo, el sufrimiento. / Lo que dura la furia del tormento, / no hay parte en mí que no se me trastorne / y que en torno de mí no esté llorando, / de nuevo protestando / que de la via espantosa atrás me torne’ (Garcilaso de la Vega, Obra poética y textos en prosa, ed., prólogo & notas de Bienvenido Morros, con un estudio preliminar de Rafael Lapesa [Barcelona: Crítica, 1995], Canción IV, ll. 121–40). Further references to Garcilaso will be taken from this edition.
37 Fernando de Herrera, Obras de Garcilaso de la Vega con anotaciones (Sevilla: Alonso de la Barrera, 1580), 299–300.
38 See Flory, ‘Stoic Psychology'. Relevant passages from the rhetoricians are included throughout the article.
39 Flory, ‘Stoic Psychology', esp. pp. 151–55. See also Gerard Watson, Phantasai in Classical Thought (Galway: Univ. of Galway Press, 1988).
40 Institutio Oratoria 6.2.29, as cited by Flory, ‘Stoic Psychology', 156; emphasis added.
41 Flory, ‘Stoic Psychology', 158–61. Flory does acknowledge that Renaissance thinkers found in Classical rhetoric a ‘welcome resource' (that Dante was an ‘early precursor'), and that later post-Enlightenment thinkers also found inspiration in Neoplatonic writings. But his central thesis (timeline), at least in this paper, remains unshaken by the admission (‘Stoic Psychology’, 162).
42 The bibliography on Augustine's understanding of the imagination is immense, and bound up with his view of memory. For a very useful synthesis, see Marianne Djuth's article ‘Veiled and Unveiled Beauty: The Role of the Imagination in Augustine's Esthetics', Theological Studies, 68 (2007), 77–91. Djuth notes that Augustine ‘places imagination at the crossroads of salvation' (77).
43 Barnard, Garcilaso de la Vega, 77–78; Erasmus, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, in Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Craig R. Thompson, trans. Betty I. Knott (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978), 295–659 (p. 577), as cited by Barnard, Garcilaso de la Vega, 77.
44 Terence Cave, ‘Enargeia: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century', L'Esprit Créatur, 16 (1976), 5–19 (p. 7).
45 Barnard, Garcilaso de la Vega, 120.
46 Meditations 1.8, in Obras completas de Santa Teresa de Jesús, transcripción,, intro. & notas de Efrén de la Madre de Dios & Otger Steggink (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1962), 336; Elena Carrera, ‘The Spiritual Role of the Emotions in Mechthild of Magdeburg, Angela of Foligno, and Teresa of Avila', in The Representation of Women's Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Lisa Perfetti (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2005), 63–89 (p. 80).
47 Santa Teresa de Jesús, Libro de la vida, ed., con intro., de Dámaso Chicharro (Madrid: Cátedra, 2014), 356.
48 See Allison B. Kavey, ‘Introduction', in World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination, ed. Allison B. Kavey (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 1–4 (p. 3).
49 As David Abulafia notes: ‘Classical imagery remained at the forefront of early descriptions of the new world by writers at the royal court in Spain. It fused with imagery of the Garden of Eden, a favourite theme of the Bible-reading Columbus' (see David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus [New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 2008], 18).
50 Mario Vargas Llosa, Sueño y realidad de América Latina (Barcelona: Arcadia, 2010), 9; emphasis added.
51 The full reference is to Sidney: ‘Nature never set forth the earth in such rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, not whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden' (see ‘The Defence of Poetry' and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism', ed. Gavin Alexander [London: Penguin, 2004], 9).
52 See her [unpublished] lecture entitled ‘Border Crossings, Theatre, and the Performance of Queenship in Habsburg Spain', delivered in Northumbria University at the annual conference of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 April 2016.
53 The full account is reproduced in Teresa Ferrer Vals, Nobleza y espectáculo teatral (1535–1622) (Sevilla/Valencia: UNED, 1993), 220–23. Conversely in Potosí, an urban religious celebration is exuberantly re-imagined as a dramatic eclogue by Diego de Mexía in his ‘Égloga intitulada el dios Pan’, from the largely unpublished Segunda parte del Parnaso antártico de divinos poemas (Potosí, 1617); see Anne Holloway, ‘ “Otros montes, otros ríos”: The Apprehension of Alterity in a Spanish American Pastoral', in her The Potency of Pastoral in the Hispanic Baroque (Woodbridge: Tamesis, forthcoming).
54 See, for example, Fernando de la Torre Farfán, Fiestas de la S. Iglesia Metropolitana y Patriarcal de Sevilla. Al nuevo culto del señor Rey S. Fernando el tercero de Castilla y León (Sevilla, 1671).
55 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson point to a renewed interest in material culture from the 1990s onwards, beginning in Art History. They suggest that the level of cultural prestige associated with the study of the Italian Renaissance may have helped lend credibility to these ‘new' approaches which focus upon ‘the things people owned and the way they used them' (see their ‘Introduction', in Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings, ed. Tara Hamling & Catherine Richardson [Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2010], 1–23 [p. 1]). In the midst of her identification of an academic turn towards ‘the everyday', Patricia Fumerton included the new-found interest in materiality in what she terms ‘a New New Historicism' (see ‘Introduction: A New New Historicism', in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton & Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania U. P., 1998), 1–17. For a useful overview of trends and preoccupations in the investigation of material culture see, for example, Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction', in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2005), 1–50.
56 Hamling & Richardson, ‘Introduction', in Everyday Objects, ed. Hamling & Richardson, 14; emphasis added.
57 Anne J. Cruz, ‘Vindicating the Vulnerata: Cádiz and the Circulation of Religious Imagery as Weapons of War’, in Material and Symbolic Circulation between Spain and England, 1554–1604, ed. Anne J. Cruz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 39–60 (p. 50). On the presence of objects within the literature of Early Modern Iberia, see also Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain, ed. Mary E. Barnard & Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2013).
58 Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
59 Richard Kearney, ‘What Is Carnal Hermeneutics?', New Literary History, 46 (2015), 99–124 (p. 116).
60 Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, 3rd ed., with a new foreword and afterword (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016 [1st ed. New York: Nation Books, 2004]).
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.