Book-in-Progress:
Eriksen’s forthcoming monograph, Garcilaso de la Vega the Spanish Mediterranean, foregrounds visual-material cultures and literary-artistic exchanges in early modernity. The study examines material-intellectual interactions between artists and writers of Spain, North Africa, Naples, and elsewhere to provide new insights on social networks, visual cultures, ekphrasis, and global spaces of exile across borders and seas. Specifically, the project approaches Garcilaso de la Vega, Titian, and Peninsular literary-artistic networks from a material perspective to draw attention to the interactions (literary, poetic, social, political) between writers and their audiences within diverse literary communities of Early Modernity. These considerations remain relevant in present times, as they center upon discourses of cultural capital, gender studies, visual cultures, and the processes of artistic innovation that inform the evolution of literary histories over time. During the research and writing phases, I completed archival research in Spain and France through the support of two Shenandoah Summer Scholars Fellowships, a Charles Gordon Reid, Jr. Fellowship, a one-year Arts & Sciences Research Fellowship, and a Tibor Wlassics Dante Fellowship.
As an effort that engages new themes in cultural studies and challenges canonical approximations, my research likewise argues that writers and artists (exiled and otherwise) in the Spanish Mediterranean become canonical on occasions in which they were made relevant to the priorities of a specific artistic, imperial, or historical moment. Indeed, the material manipulation of writers and texts has distorted the reception and subsequent artistic and literary histories in significant ways. The presence of numerous editorial hands in initial compilation and organization of Garcilaso’s poetry, for example, speaks to the ways in which scholars received and commented on the poet’s ekphrastic vignettes in subsequent editions. The manuscript presents a reexamination of Garcilaso’s humanist profiles as contemporary successor to Virgil and Ovid. The poet’s ekphrastic rewriting of Latin texts, for example, is indicative of the intellectual environment and artistic audience within spaces of exile; at the same time, the recasting of classical and contemporary texts speaks to the highly visual nature of Renaissance culture, as the recasting of earlier models serves both as a gesture of artistic acumen and a commentary on contemporary production. The monograph shows the ways in which such exiles brought a classical past into dialogue with their present age vis-à-vis mythological subtexts, and in doing so, the ways in which they fashioned a classical persona as an artistic pursuit.