Enfilade

From Vanderbilt University Press:

Luis Martín-Estudillo, Goya and the Mystery of Reading (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2023), 268 pages, ISBN: 978-0826505330, $120 / ISBN: 978-0826505323 (paperback), $50. Also available as an ebook.

Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) lived through an era of profound societal change. One of the transformations that he engaged passionately was the unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available. He documented and questioned this reading revolution in some of his most captivating paintings, prints, and drawings. Goya and the Mystery of Reading explores the critical impact this transition had on the work of an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to see it anew—to read it. Goya’s creations offer a sustained reflection on the implications of reading, which he depicted as an ambiguous, often mysterious activity: one which could lead to knowledge or ecstasy, to self-fulfillment or self-destruction, to piety or perdition. At the same time, he used reading to elicit new possibilities of interpretation. This book reveals for the first time the historical, intellectual, and artistic underpinnings of reading as one of the pillars of his art.

Luis Martín-Estudillo is a professor and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa. His previous books include The Rise of Euroskepticism, winner of an NEH Open Book Award. He is executive editor of the Hispanic Issues series.

c o n t e n t s

Author’s Note

Introduction: Francisco de Goya and the Reading Revolutions
1  Reading and Politics
2  Reading and the Self
3  Reading, Leisure, and Sensuality
4  Reading and the Contours of the Human
Afterword: Words Written at the Edge of Shadows

Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index