Quevedo, Contreras, Duque de Estrada y sus conceptos del Mediterráneo

Abstract

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This article analyses the verbal representation of the Mediterranean area at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century in Mundo caduco by Quevedo in contrast with the one offered by Duque de Estrada and Contreras in their respective autobiographies. The theoretical background is the postulates of Lefebvre and Soja, for whom space is a social construction with a strategic and political meaning, which depends on power struggles. Verbal representations of space reproduce this dialectic in addition to the subjective authorial perception. In his description Quevedo imposes his political and personal agenda, which moralises and fixates the social-geographical places while Contreras and Duque de Estrada’s testimonies offer a dynamic vision of the Mediterranean as an ambiguous zone filled with conflicts and with commercial, human and cultural exchanges.