La belleza de las feas: Releyendo el episodio romano del persiles a la luz de la española inglesa

The present work analyzes the specular relationship between two episodes present in The Spanish English Lady and the Persiles respectively: The poisoning of the heroines, which results in the loss of their beauty and their near death. I claim that both representations of a transitory ugliness configure a game of parallels and mirroring inversions, which constitutes a call to reflection on the paradoxes of the opposites beauty / ugliness both in these novels and beyond. Finally, it will also be suggested that these episodes convey projections of a meta-poetic order, responding in their modalities to the Cervantine aesthetics that I identify as the poetics of border crossing.