Where to begin? Perhaps with the commonplace observation, an observation that has perplexed students of creativity for decades, that oftentimes Giants walk the earth not only simultaneously and in proximate pairs but sometimes in small herds! Think Byron, Shelley and Keats. Think Pound, Stevens, Williams, Eliot and Marianne Moore. Think, now, of Miguel Cervantes (1547–1616), Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), Lope de Vega (1562–1635), and Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), the four titans of Spain’s Siglo de Oro. It was the professional and personal conflict between Quevedo and Góngora that furnished the ideological schism in that era’s literature, a schism that gave rise to the novella under review, The Dog and the Fever (El Perro y La Calentura) by Pedro Espinosa (1578–1650). This schism was part of a Eurocentric shift in thinking about classical origins and diction versus a more “modern” preference for concepts, substance. Whether it was metaphysical poetry in England...

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