The introduction discusses the ways in which Alejo Carpentier has been seen by critics over time. Showing that much has been said about the writer’s style and vision for a Latin America that is connected to the world, this chapter also discusses critiques of the writer’s unfailing support for the Cuban Revolution and a controversy surrounding his official biography. It further presents readers with the history of Carpentier’s editorial successes and the recent renaissance of interest in his work, and it showcases resources for further Carpentier research. It ends by briefly introducing the six-part division of the book and each of its contributions.

This chapter argues that the influence of Carpentier on Cuban literature of his time and after is not clear, given that there was some animosity towards him. It cites as reasons the fact of Carpentier’s absence from Cuba in the 1970s. It also acknowledges that the teachers who taught the Novísimo generation of Cuban writers with whom the author identifies most closely all emphasized the mastery of Carpentier’s prose and admired what they called Carpentier’s carnivalization of language or baroque language. The chapter concludes that understanding how Carpentier’s lifelong journalism had served as a foundation of his literary writing was an important lesson for him and others, and he ends by calling Carpentier a classic.

A substantial portion of Alejo Carpentier’s writings, nonfictional and fictional, can be classified as Neobaroque, making their author one of the key representatives of this transhistorical, transnational, cross-cultural and interartistic contemporary movement. This chapter focuses on images and expressions of deformed chronology that abound in Carpentier’s fiction, and which are associated with the Baroque, an aesthetics of excess and transgression that sets established forms into variation. It argues that what can be classified as baroque futurisms – eccentric because it deforms linear chronology – is the gist of Carpentier’s concept of the New World Baroque. The chapter briefly outlines Carpentier’s Baroque theory before exploring instances of baroque futurism in representative works of Carpentier’s fiction.

Asking the question of when the Renaissance ended, the Conclusion proposes it to be the early seventeenth century, with the advent of the Baroque as a literary and artistic movement. This shift was accompanied by a sharp change in gender attitudes, with the sixteenth century elites’ general stance of supportiveness to women’s cultural ambitions being displaced by a born-again misogyny, which began to abate only at the end of the seventeenth century. Postdating the end of the Renaissance to the early seventeenth century produces a more coherent narrative than traditional periodizations that regard the advent of the Counter-Reformation as a cultural end point. It also helps to challenge widely adopted but questionable constructions of European cultural history which posit a translatio imperii et studii from southern to northern Europe dating to the Protestant Reformation. The book concludes with a call for further work on the neglected Late Renaissance moment of the late sixteenth century with the aim of ‘reintegrating’ the Renaissance and enabling a better understanding of the full arc of the movement.

The vestments and regalia worn by the pope have long been used to convey the role’s primacy and singularity in the Catholic Church as both temporal and spiritual sovereign. This chapter describes the evolution of papal garb, alongside their visual and textual representations, from the twelfth century to the present day. It also maps the changing sites of the reception of the pope’s appearance over eight centuries, considering how the papacy has mobilized clothing to convey meaning in different pastoral, political, and media contexts. Clothing and regalia have been used strategically and deliberately, at various times, to represent the pope’s spiritual humility, his wealth and prestige, his status as international diplomat, and his sovereignty.

Chapter 6 takes as its subject the relatively sudden proliferation of narrative images of the virtuous deeds and dramatic martyrdom of the saints that became popular themes for altarpieces in the second half of the sixteenth century. These transformations to the altarpiece were the result of earlier artistic developments, but they were also shaped by the context of the Reformations.

The chronology of the Baroque age in Russian culture is contested, but by the broadest definition it can be located in the second half of the seventeenth century and approximately the first third of the eighteenth century. The emergence of the Baroque tends to coincide with the emergence of the court as a focus and patron. General features include a greater prominence of individuality (even originality), a greater emphasis on entertainment as one function and purpose of literary production, and a highlighting of performative verbal and formal devices. This chapter explores two types of literary production that particularly exemplify aspects of the Baroque mode: parody and satire, and syllabic verse. As a case-study in the latter, the chapter introduces a cycle of poems by the most prominent and prolific Baroque versifier, and arguably Moscow’s first professional writer of literature, Simeon Polotskii.

This introduction sets out Major’s view of his age, "the experimental century," in relation to curiosity and curation. Although curiosity had been recuperated from a vice to a virtue in early modern Europe, Major continued to relate curiosity to original sin as a faulty, bodily lust for knowledge. This insatiable desire drove all people since Adam, but it did so more than ever in his age when the bounds and divisions set upon knowledge in the traditional encyclopedia were torn down. Curators applied cura or care (from the same root as curiosity) to knowledge. By acknowledging their own flaws, curators could guide the passion for knowledge closer and closer to truth, which, however, always remained out of human reach.

“Metatheatre,” the term coined by Lionel Abel, flourished in the baroque (roughly 1550–1650) and modernist (or neobaroque, twentieth century) in Europe and the United States. Rather than representing the illusion of reality, it represents the reality of illusion. Pirandello’s Henry IV may be read as a modernist rendering of Hamlet. More radically than Hamlet, “Henry” perceives the impossibility of grasping truth beneath appearances and chooses to live in theatrical play forever. This chapter compares Six Characters in Search of an Author to an untitled play by the baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Both feature characters angry at their author and discussion of a play to be made. In each, the “fourth wall” is removed to reveal theatre-in-process. Instead of portraying theatre as an imitation of life, metatheatre reveals life’s inherent theatricality.

First mentioned in 1194, Bayreuth became the centre of the rule of the Margraves of Andechs-Merania. The city reached its Baroque heyday in the mid-eighteenth century under the regency of Margraves Friedrich and Wilhelmine, a sister of Friedrich II of Prussia (‘the Great’). After the loss of the margravial residence in 1769 and as a result of the Napoleonic Empire, the city lost its former importance and passes from Prussian to Bavarian rule. The poet Jean Paul (actually Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) lived in Bayreuth from 1804 until his death in 1825. With Richard Wagner’s move to Bayreuth in 1872, the construction of the Festspielhaus, and the founding of the Bayreuth Festival in 1876, the city in the Franconian province becomes the epitome of German culture with international significance and impact – but also a symbol of the ideological claim to Wagner by National Socialism and the Wagnerian Adolf Hitler.

The next chapter on Macbeth looks at how the play uses a Baroque, expressionist aesthetic to help define the empty world of power it depicts, and the ambiguities of the Baroque aesthetic form as defined by Walter Benjamin provide the setting for the faint glimmers of utopian thinking in the play. In this, the complicated figures called the Weird Sisters in the play’s text – but Witches in the paratextual stage directions and speech prefixes of the non-authorial Folio text – play a central role and get detailed examination. They are fundamentally ambiguous dramatic figures, showing conflicting traits as both the Three Fates of classical mythology and witches of medieval and early modern legend and belief-systems. Accordingly, they can be seen as either detached prophets merely predicting events, or co-agents of Macbeth’s crimes and failures. There are even utopian elements in their complex construction, especially if the songs Thomas Middleton inserted in the Folio text are taken into account. But the play remains a dark tragedy of the emptiness and cruelty of the politics of force, its hints at utopian alternatives muted and subordinated to the predominant bleak and troubling qualities of a world dominated by force and power.

This chapter turns to the curatorial role of authors on the countershelf, tracing the impact of Octavio Paz’s sojourn as Mexican ambassador to India (1962–1968) on Indian poets and artists in the little magazine scene of the 1960s and 1970s, including Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Geeta Kapur, and Jagdish Swaminathan. While Neruda often formed the image of the countershelf for South Asian authors, Paz was the nearly invisible engine through which that imaginary consolidated. Paz’s sensibility of “strangerhood” reflected his growing interest in the baroque, a form which emerged to aestheticize the rapidly and radically changing concept of the world in the era of colonial expansion. This same strategy was taken up by several creators of Indian little magazines, among whom Paz helped to establish a very particular idea of world-literary friendship: not an increasingly unified and easily digestible singular style but a series of intentionally disorienting enigmas. Both route through Latin American literature of the 1960s, but the 1970s Indian poets set a very different course for global English, one that the rise of the novelists in the 1980s dramatically interrupted and then, essentially, cut off.

The hybrid name for Latin America is a clue to its double consciousness and, as a corollary, to its talent for exploring complexity. A push and pull between competing classical and local lineages among displaced and replaced peoples has brought curses on Latin America, but also the blessings of an unbidden freedom to invent new patterns. If bitterness haunts the deracination on a continental scale, irreverence lightens the burden. From colonial times through the current post-Boom period, Latin American literature has been a vehicle for cagey revenge against metropolitan conventions, and for re-membering aboriginal cultures. The legend of Inkari, for example, literally foretells how the body of the Inca emperor, dismembered by Spanish conquerors, will reassemble underground and emerge triumphant. Double consciousness in Latin America describes a culture of baroque anxiety and compensation for doubt about one’s place in the world. With Afro-Latin American literature, the ironies multiply exponentially. Architectural monuments to excess -- meant to overwhelm worries that followed from the discovery of sophisticated cultures that had no debts Europe – worries about the nature of God, the center of culture, one’s own identity -- are visible throughout the continent’s landscape. Local gods and African orishas adorn Catholic temples. Excess is audible too, in the complex strategies for addressing readers, starting from colonial times and reviving after interruptions of purposeful coherence and optimism. The great first masters of Latin American literature were baroque, practically by default as they navigated conflicting codes and overwhelmed the fault lines with clever structures. As pioneers of local style, they set the tone for future movements, through the taste for complexity waffled when political ambitions for independence or national consolidation triumphed through foundational fictions written by political leaders in order to win the hearts of newly minted citizens.  Compared to the skillful jousts with European conventions by baroque masters, nation builders and populists would seem naïve to the ironic novelists who ignited a Boom in Latin American literature and who brought European readers face to face with the structural contradictions of modern cultures.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote with an awareness of developments in the visual arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, often seen as spearheading the Modernist movement in all the arts. As well as being a profoundly visual poet and sharing an interest in detailed description with her mentor Marianne Moore, Bishop also questioned the idea of a settled point of view and embraced both uncertainty and multiplicity in relation to seeing. Temperamentally she found an affinity with the idea of the Baroque in seventeenth-century writing and in the parallels with twentieth-century art drawn in art theory. Her early attraction to Surrealism also had to do with the disorientating effects of seeing and the uncertain boundary between inner and outer worlds. A writer who also painted herself, though in a small way, Bishop was always alert to issues of spatial representation, and how art and writing traced a similar process of their own emergence.

Surrealism thrived within environments characterized by a profusion of collected objects that inspired the surrealist collector’s work and thought. André Breton (in Paris) and Roland Penrose and Lee Miller (in Sussex) had well-documented collections that reveal the practice of collecting at the root of surrealist theories of the object; they anticipated recent explorations of new materialism by Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, and of the object as thing by W. J. T. Mitchell. Breton saw “concealed realities” and “latent possibilities” in objects in a way that foreshadowed the “vital materialism” Bennett finds in things. Like Breton, Penrose and Miller favored objects that had had a ceremonial function in their culture of origin, remote in time as well as geographically, as a way of understanding themselves better. In both collections, the impressive sculptures from the Pacific Islands exemplify the surrealist desire to orient the self within a larger world through objects capable of looking back.