| Summary: | Luis de Gongora (1561-1627) and Lope de Vega (1562 - 1635) are contemporaries and rivals, whose late parodic poems call into question the dominant features of analytical response to the genre: an undervaluation of parodic counter-texts within a context of general critical neglect; and the limitations of studies which attempt to establish and fix meaning on a mode of writing which, this thesis argues, depends on its inherent ambiguity and deliberately anti-mimetic nature in order to forge significantly ironic connections between word and baroque realities. The overarching question of this thesis, is why do these poets turn to parody at the end of their careers? To this end, the study focuses on both poets' parodic trajectories, from G6ngora's 1589 Hero and Leander romance through to his culminating parody, La/cibula de Piramo y Tisbe (1618), and through Lope de Vega's alter ago Tome de Burguillos, whose anthology, Rimas humanas y divinas del licenciado Tome de Burguillos, was published a year before Lope's death, in 1634. Working from the premise that parody provides a Derridean supplement to exhausted, dominant modes (e .g. Petrarchism) and genres (e.g. pastoral, lyric, epic), this study asks: what do these texts achieve by their supplementarity, and how do they achieve it? Through an analysis of the texts' intertextual relationships with the architext or doxa, of their linguistic str~tegies (including meta-language), and of their ethos, this study will question the processes and paradoxes at work in Lope's and G6ngora's late parody. This comparative study seeks to reveal the depth of our poets' late parodic works, and, against the grain of dominant criticism which sets them in opposition, the extent to which their parodic trajectories correlate.
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