Teorias de la imitacion en los tratados retoricos espanoles del siglo XVI. Edicion y traduccion del dialogo "De imitatione" de Sebastian Fox Morcillo.

The idea of imitation is at the center of all artistic and creative activity during the Renaissance. Scholarly efforts have been made to elucidate both the theoretical foundations and the actual practice of this principle. Studies on the local cases of Italy, France, and England have offered a profound analysis of the subject. This dissertation attempts to complete the European picture by examining the question in the Hispanic tradition. I approach the study of the imitation of literary models (the imitation of nature or "mimesis" falls outside the scope of my work) as conceived by the Spanish theorists of the Sixteenth Century, investigating what was meant by the term "imitation" and what aesthetic and philosophical principles and traditions were at work when discussing it. The study examines all the texts on imitation written in Spain during the cinquecento. Among them, there is one work of major significance, De imitatione (Fox Morcillo, 1554), one less important treatise, De vera et facili imitatione Ciceronis (Palmireno, 1560), and several commentaries included in general works on both civil and sacred oratory. I focus primarily on the treatise by Fox Morcillo, of which the second part of the dissertation presents the first modern annotated edition and a translation into Spanish. The study of the theoretical bases of Fox's text (namely, that the variety of styles derives ultimately from the variety of body temperaments, and that consequently, one should imitate a model to which one is "naturally" similar) poses an extremely interesting question: the relationship between types of eloquence and types of natural disposition. The research offers a first step in the understanding of the origin and development of the notion of "personal" style during the Renaissance, an intriguing idea, in that such a theme should appear precisely in a treatise on imitation. Three main traditions may be observed in the configuration of Fox Morcillo's ideas: the development of the hippocratic-galenic theory of body humors, the classical rhetorical norms that provide the use of the figure of prosopopoeia, ascribing a certain type of expression to a certain type of character, and finally some philosophical Renaissance texts dealing with imitation and other aesthetic questions.PhDRomance Languages and Literature: SpanishUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/102967/1/9226982.pdfDescription of 9226982.pdf : Restricted to UM users only