About Violendings
Is Cervantes’ La Galatea the first bloodstained pastoral novel? Or the first work in which the murder appears in the present-tense narration, ‘in front of the reader’s eyes’? These questions and, even more so, the tendency to respond in the affirmative, lead us to another question of greater significance: why has the Spanish pastoral novel received such little attention, pigeonholed within the cliché of the Arcadian world of hyper-sweetened, static harmony?
Nothing could be further from the truth. This literary tradition, heir to both the chivalric and the Byzantine romance and the framework for multiple courtly novels, is no stranger to the inclusion of violence (among other anti-Arcadian elements) as one of the devices that kept its wide audience of avid consumers in suspense. A corpus around 23 pastoral novels was written in Europe in Spanish language during the 16th and 17th centuries, but although it was a very popular literary genre in its time, many of these works have not been re-edited since their first publication and have not been studied.
It was in this context that I decided to devote myself to this literary tradition and contemplated the need to evaluate the presence of violence in Spanish pastoral novels and in the inserted courtly novels, propose a categorization of the strategies of regulation of violence, and perform a diachronic study of their implementation from the publication of La Diana by Jorge de Montemayor in 1559 to the genre’s death rattles in the 17th century. This project, identified by the acronym VIOLENDINGS —Violence and Happy Endings in the Spanish Golden Age Narrative— (Grant Agreement ID: 101062513), won funding from European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions under the first Horizon Europe call (2021) and was developed at the Università degli Studi di Milano’s Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, Culture e Mediazioni between 2022 and 2024.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or The European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
