The Substance Of Cervantes

A 1986 examination of the foundation upon which Cervantes constructed his works from La Galatea (1585) to Persiles y Sigismunda (1617).

Cervantes' work closely analysed for evidence of his attitude to academic life and to conversos, and his responses to technical challenges. A number of longstanding polemical issues related to Cervantes' life and creativity are closely examined here, throwing new light on his work as a whole. The book begins by exploring Cervantes' complex and ambivalent attitude towards academic life, which yielded comic portraits of students and many parodies of the academic tendencies of false praise, pedantry and pompousness. It goes on to consider the impact of the converso, or New Christian, on Spanish collective thinking, and Cervantes and Lope de Vega in particular; Old Christian versus New Christian rhetoric frequently determines the expression of such characters as Sancho Panza. An analysis of Cervantes' controversialinterpolation of stories in the first part of Don Quijote follows, and Professor Finello concludes by looking at the enigmatic discourse and dialogue of Don Quijote himself, elegant and harmonious despite the knight's apparent madness, arguing that since Quijote believes he is justified in imposing his chivalric values upon those who come into contact with him, he adjusts the situations in which he finds himself to the appropriate rhetoric of literary tradition. DOMINICK FINELLO is Professor of Spanish at Rider University.

This volume contains seven sections, exploring in depth Cervantes's life and how the trials, tribulations, and hardships endured influenced his writing. Cervantistas from numerous countries, offer their expertise with the most up-to-date research and interpretations to complete this wide-ranging, but detailed, compendium.

The satirical story of the man from La Mancha has been popular for nearly 400 years.

Arguably the most influential work to emerge from Spain's Golden Age, Don Quixote laid the groundwork for the Western literary canon and remains one of its major achievements.

"Pastoral Themes and Forms in Cervantes's Fiction explores the various pastoral dimensions of Cervantes's art, from his early Galatea, which is a pastoral novel, to his masterful Don Quijote de la Mancha. Dominick Finello here focuses on the pastoral's impact on the composition of Don Quijote: its rural backdrop of a rustic Spain; the literary inheritance of its characters and style; its dialogic structure, which reflects that of the pastoral novel; and the vital stimulus produced by Cervantes's direct observation of the effects of imaginative pastoral disguises and mimetic play on its characters, including bucolic games, the representation of eclogues and masques, and other such diversions. The blending of pastoral themes and forms into his fiction has led Cervantes to ring major changes on conventional patterns of the pastoral." "The pastoral's congenial interaction with the creativity of Don Quijote is apparent in the novel's settings and character conception. With regard to the settings, pastoral style in the Quijote focuses specifically on the geographical configuration and rural backdrop of Don Quijote's adventures and eventually places them in the context of the history of pastoral nomadism on the Iberian peninsula. With regard to characters, shepherds, goatherds, farmers, and other rural people appear everywhere in the Quijote; and Sancho Panza is the leading rustic personage from this group. Sancho's felicitous projection of pastoral life reflects his fundamental optimism. Don Quijote is linked to the literary shepherd through his discourse on the golden age, his imitation of the lovelord shepherd in the Sierra Morena episode of part 1, and the "Pastor Quijotiz" scheme, which signals his demise late in part 2. Dulcinea, Don Quijote's beloved, is conceived with both the rustic and literary dimensions of the pastoral heroine." "One of the essential features of the Quijote is its dialogic structure, which reflects that of the Renaissance academic colloquium and that of the pastoral novel. Another vital pastoral stimulus of Cervantes's art is his direct observation of the effects of imaginative pastoral disguises and mimetic play on his characters. The documented social customs involving pastoral mimesis (such as eclogues, masques, and games) indicate that pastoral expression and values have been integrated to a significant degree into the fabric of the lives of Cervantes's characters." "Cervantes's attitude toward the pastoral may be established through direct statements he made about pastoral authors, poems, and books. It may also be constituted through less direct means - such as the abrupt conclusion and subsequent disappearance of pastoral stories from the main narrative of the Quijote."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book offers a radically new reading of Don Quijote, understanding it as a whole much greater than the sum of its famous parts. David Quint discovers a unified narrative and deliberate thematic design in a novel long taught as the very definition of the picaresque and as a rambling succession of individual episodes. Quint shows how repeated motifs and verbal details link the episodes, often in surprising and heretofore unnoticed ways. Don Quijote emerges as a work that charts and reflects upon the historical transition from feudalism to the modern times of a moneyed, commercial society. In Part One of the novel, this change is measured in a shift in the nature of erotic desire, and we find Don Quijote torn between his love for Dulcinea and his hopes to wed for wealth and social advancement. In Part Two, Don Quijote himself changes from anarchic madman to a gentler, wiser hero--a member of a middle class in the making. Throughout, Cervantes meditates on the literary form that he is inventing as a response to modernity, questioning the novel's relationship to other genres and the place of heroism and imagination within stories of everyday life. A new and coherent guide through the maze-like structure of Don Quijote, this book invites readers to appreciate the perennial modernity of Cervantes's masterpiece---a novel that confronts times not so distant from our own.

Traditional Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigms of love started to show clear signs of inadequacy and exhaustion in the sixteenth century. How did the Spanish Golden Age recast worn out discourses of love and make them compelling again? This volume explores how Spanish letters recognized that old love paradigms, especially the crisis of the subject, presented an extraordinary opportunity for revising traditional literary strictures. As a result, during Spain’s nascent modernity, literature took up the challenge to expand existing forms of desire and subjectivity. A range of scholars show how canonical and non-canonical Golden Age writers like Miguel de Cervantes, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, Lope de Vega, and Francisco de la Torre y Sevil became equal agents of the sweeping ontological reconfiguration of the idea of eros that defined their culture. Such reconfiguration includes: the troubling displacement of "self" and "other" seen in sentimental genres like the pastoral or romance; the overlapping of emotions such as love and jealousy characteristic of the baroque lyric and dramatic production; and the conflation of axioms such as eros and eris prevalent in contemporaneous epic experiments. In uniting the findings of often surprising texts, the collection of essays in Goodbye Eros takes a pioneering look at how Golden Age moral, ideological, scientific, and literary discourses intersected to create fascinating re-elaborations of the trope of love.