Abstract

This article offers an interpretation of Miguel de Cervantes’ exemplary novella The Two Damsels (1613). Its theoretical and methodical basis is informed by the achievements of recent approaches from men’s studies and one of its most important representatives, R. W. Connell’s foundational work on Masculinities (2005). My reading elucidates what pre-modern readers identified as «masculine» in a literary text, particularly in cases where women dressed as men, a literary artifice and social practice which, following Judith Halberstam, I read as an example of pre-modern «female masculinity». I thus show how theories stemming from postmodernity can open up new approaches to interpreting and understanding pre-modern cultural phenomena while insisting on the distance that separates us from these pre-modern conceptions of what «being a man» signified in a long-gone culture and society. Given these twin aims, this article explains historical alterity via a current theoretical model but does so without translating that alterity immediately into concepts that may sound familiar —perhaps deceptively so.

Abstract

Biopics of writers abound in cinema; however, of all the canonical Spanish Golden Age authors, only Lope’s biography has attracted cinematographic attention. In this paper we analyse the way the Fénix is presented in Lope, by Andrucha Waddington (2010), the last biopic of the author, in which reality and fiction intertwine to show the life of the «primer Lope». We show that the image of the poet in Waddington’s film is drawn from features created both by Lope himself and other authors, and that some of these particular features contribute to dilute the singularities of his life and personality.