Novel has created as many forms as the novels have been written so for. Starting from realism it has went through a lot of transformations and adopted or invented generic techniques to narrate almost everything human. In Urdu, novel usually concerned more about the social life and social change it depicted. By maintaining a liquidating equilibrium…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.

Using the transatlantic relación of Diego Portichuelo de Ribadeneyra (1657) as an example, this essay tracks some of the ways in which several religious passengers narrated their experience crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the Spanish Indies fleets during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Of particular importance here are the ways in…[Read more]

This chapter is the product of a Keynote Address that Dr. Davis offered at the VII Conference of the Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro which took place at Robinson College, Cambridge, 18-22 July, 2005. Here the author examines a variety of kinds of early modern Spanish maritime writing (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).