The Invention of the Lyric Body: The Body of Helen in Hispanic Literature and Visual Arts

This book examines the evolution of the female lyric body in Western culture through the figure of Helen of Troy, focusing on the Hispanic literary archive and its evolving strategies for representing her and her cultural doubles, here defined as Helen-like bodies. It explores literary subgenres dedicated to body representation and the techniques used to capture the body’s complexity, socially coded beauty, and evocative power within distinct ideological and aesthetic frameworks. It also investigates the relationship between literary description and pictorial portraiture across the covered period, using an interdisciplinary approach that includes feminist theory, literary studies, ekphrastic criticism, rhetoric, and visual culture. Through this lens, the book introduces the concept of the lyric body as a canvas for societal values and ideologies, a surface densely inscribed with emotive and symbolic signifiers. The lyric body emerges as a cumulative construct, shaped by centuries of reinterpretation and reflecting shifting power structures and paradigms.

In following Helen and her afterlives, this study reveals how female bodies are idealized, codified, fractured, erased, or given voice. It shows how the lyric body has remained a central, contested surface in Hispanic literature and visual culture and how it continues to engage questions of gender, visibility, and representation.

Osvaldo Cleger is Associate Professor of Spanish at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. He specializes in literature and visual arts, with a focus on Spain and Latin America.