Novelas Ejemplares

This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading Cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. An extensive general Introduction places the Novelas in the context of Cervantes's life and work; provides basic information about their content, composition, internal ordering, publication, and critical reception, gives detailed consideration to the contemporary literary-theoretical issues implicit in the title, and outlines and contributes to the key critical debates on their variety, unity, exemplarity, and supposed 'hidden mystery'. After a series of chapters on the individual stories, the volume concludes with two survey essays devoted, respectively, to the understanding of eutrapelia implicit in the Novelas, andto the dynamics of the character pairing that is one of their salient features. Detailed plot summaries of each of the stories, and a Guide to Further Reading are supplied as appendices. Stephen Boyd is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies of University College Cork.

Miguel de Cervantes is probably the greatest writer of the Spanish Golden Age, whose influence on the Spanish language has been profound. Readers who know Cervantes only as the author of Don Quijote will be surprised and delighted by what they find in the Novelas ejemplares, published in 1613 and whose composition spanned a decade and more preceding their publication. Don Quijote may be the most celebrated novel in western literature, but the Novelas ejemplares are among its most unjustly neglected masterpieces. They consist of twelve long short stories or short novels, each quite unlike the others. The geographical contrast alone could not be sharper, with settings ranging from the Aegean to the Caribbean and from Britain to North Africa. The stories teem with characters drawn from an equally broad social spectrum, from the new, affluent nobility to self-made merchants, feisty women, confidence tricksters, criminals and excluded minorities. Scarcely a contemporary conflict goes unreferenced, scarcely an important European town or city goes unvisited, while many,especially in Spain, play a major role in the economic, social and political context of the stories. Furthermore none of the major fictional genres of Cervantes's time is missing from the rich mix of literary allusion designed to appeal to a well-read, metropolitan audience.The Novelas ejemplares are a narrative tour de force, an exhibition of sophisticated story-telling, daringly original in concept, executed with subtlety and imagination, wide-ranging, entertaining and amusing, to be read for pleasure as well as profit. Taken together, they provide an overview of many of Cervantes's recurring themes - the complexity of human nature and the unpredictability of human behaviour. They provide a series of working models of what happens when people are put under extreme pressure, all viewed from Cervantes's typically ironic standpoint. A modern English translation was not available until the original appearance of the versions that follow, in four volumes, in 1992. Now for the first time all twelve stories are collected in one volume. For the second fully updated edition Barry Ife's authoritative General Introduction has been re-written and more of the important original preliminaries have been edited and translated so that the reader has a greater sense of the context of the 1613 publication. Specifically these are the four aprobaciones the work received and Cervantes's dedication to the Count of Lemos, both translated into English for the first time.

Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares: Reading their Lessons from His Time to Ours offers a fresh approach to the Novelas ejemplares (1613) of Cervantes in which the twelve novelas are not analyzed individually nor on the basis of generic definitions but rather from a thematic perspective. In this way, certain pertinent themes and problems are explored by grouping the relevant novelas as they dramatize these problems, often leaving the reader with unresolved “conclusions,” and in other instances offering an affirmative solution. The issues examined include the ironies and injustices of social class, the problem of honra and justice, the complex hostilities and interactions of distinct cultures, and the problem of finding a seventeenth-century work of fiction relevant and stimulating to the twenty-first-century reader.

"Ricapito's amply documented study of the Gypsy in Spain, the complex political relationship between Spain and England, and the Italo-Hispanic cultural relations of the period point up new areas of inquiry hitherto lacking in the study of Cervantes' "La gitanilla, La espaola inglesa, " and "La seora Cornelia.""--Dominick Finella, author of "Pastoral Themes and Forms in Cervantes' Fiction."

From the creator of Don Quixote, the most famous figure in Spanish literature, comes this trio of novellas: "La gitanilla," a gypsy romance; "El coloquio de los perros," a dialogue between two dogs; and "Rinconete y Cortadillo," a day in the underworld of 18th-century Seville. Introduction, new English translation, and notes.

This study examines the narrative features and numerous textual aspects of the Novelas ejemplares, and also takes into consideration certain external aspects like intertextual features and specific concerns within narratology.

In The Great Chiasmus, Paul R. Olson explores the use of the chiasmus in the work of Miguel de Unamuno. The chiasmus, a reversal in the order of words or parts of speech in parallel phrases, appears on a variety of levels, from brief microstructures (blanca como la nieve y como la nieve fria), to the narrative structures of entire novel. Olson even suggests the chiasmus encompasses the stages in Unamuno's novelistic work, forming a chiasmus that can be schematized as ABC: CBA. As a phenomenon of enclosure, the chiasmus is related to other enclosing phenomena such as the image of Chinese boxes and the mise en abyme. These structures, three-dimensional version of the chiasmus, are also frequent in Unamuno's texts. The chiasmus is also found on the conceptual level, in which Unamuno regards apparent contraries as freely reversible and thus identical. From early adulthood he was fascinated by the Hegelian idea of the identity of pure Being and pure Nothingness, and that concept provides the structure underlying a wide variety of his paradoxes and verbal conceits. In this connection, Unamuno explores concepts usually considered opposites, such as mind and body or spirit and matter. Olson's close readings of the texts in terms of this structure lead to observations on Spanish history, events in Unamuno's life, the psychological dimensions of his characters, and the authorial self that is found within his texts.