Et in Erifile ego: Poetic imitation and intertextuality in Bernardo de Balbuena's pastoral milieu

This dissertation seeks to investigate the skill with which Bernardo de Balbuena employed poetic imitatio in his pastoral novel El Siglo de Oro en las selvas de Erifile. From Classical Antiquity through the Baroque, authors relied heavily on borrowings from previous works relating to their own composition. Balbuena wrote his novel with this in mind. In it, he constructs his tale while complexly and expertly interweaving his sources from Classical, Italian and Spanish literature.; Chapter I establishes Balbuena within his poetic circle, by examining the encomiastic poems at the beginning of the work. No less than authors such as Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo and Mira de Amescua number themselves among Balbuena's admirers. Chapter II takes the content of the sonnets and the other laudatory poems in the preliminaries, which make reference to the pastoral genre and also Balbuena's imitative strategies. Chapter III discusses the poetic theories of imitation before and at the time of Balbuena writing the novel and then puts it into the context of modern intertextual theory. Since it is a hybrid form of novel, including both prose and poetry, I chose to divide the treatment of the text into the last two chapter. Chapter IV deals with the prose section, covering narrative conventions of the pastoral as well as imitative themes and motifs. Chapter V concludes the word with a detailed intertextual examination of the poems of El Siglo de Oro en las selvas de Erifile.