The Castaway’s Bond: Shipwreck and Survival from Renaissance Poetry to the Fourth Genre

Elizabeth Davis specializes in literature and culture of early modern Spain. Her research has focused on strands of a Spanish imperial culture that inform both lyric and epic poetry of the period. She is the author of Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain (University of Missouri Press, 2000). Her current research focuses on the infrastructure and culture of early modern Spanish travel, on land, on the seas, in coastal areas and port cities. She has co-edited, with Elizabeth R. Wright, a special issue of Calíope 2014, Vol. 19, No. 1, titled Mare Nostrum?: Navigating the Mediterranean Crosscurrents in Spanish Poetry. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Seafarer’s Bond: Risk, Transaction and Textual Circulation in the Spanish Atlantic World (1544-1660), examines the cultural implications of written transactions (private letters and ones from Armada officers, shipwreck accounts, etc.) on the open seas that textually rephrase Spanish culture across the Iberian Atlantic. Professor Davis served as President of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry during 2014-2017 and as Member and Chair of the Executive Committee for the Division on Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Spanish Prose and Poetry of the Modern Language Association of America (2006-2010).