From geography to verse: the literary configuration of Granada in Pedro Soto de Rojas’s Desengaño de amor en rimas

Abstract

Pedro Soto de Rojas offers the reader a reconstruction of Granada that is aesthetically and effectively suited to the narrative dossiers of Desengaño de amor en rimas. The natural places (Sierra Nevada, the vega and the Generalife) and the places more circumscribed to the urban environment are evoked through a sensory refinement that manages to elaborate, finally, a geographical space outside the mere observation of reality. Based on the assumption just outlined, the purpose of the present work is to delve deeper into the literary construction of Granada that Soto carries out in his "juvenile" work. After a brief introduction about landscape in literature, a status quaestionis of the representation of Granada in the Andalusian poet's songbook will be traced, linking it to the distinctive features of the sensorial elocutio. Finally, paradigmatic cases will be analysed, paying attention to how the landscape of Granada dialogues with the topoi of Italo-Renaissance and Baroque poetry.