New York Public Library Digital Collection
Bucolic Metaphors: History, Subjectivity and Gender in the Early Modern Spanish Pastoral by
An in-depth examination of the cultural functions of the pastoral in Spain, this study of Montemayor's La Diana and Cervantes's pastoral texts moves away from studies that consider this literature as purely escapist and imitative. Rosilie Hernandez-Pecoraro considerably expands the discussion on the importance of the pastoral genre to early modern Spanish studies and supplements the ways in which these texts have conventionally been considered by Hispanists.
Cervantes' Don Quixote by
The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes' novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria's popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes' masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. Gonzalez Echevarria addresses the novel's major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of predicaments: the individual's dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that world mesh with his desires."
Cervantes' Epic Novel: Empire, Religion, and the Dream Life of Heroes in Persiles by
This study sets out to help restore Persiles to pride of place within Cervantes's corpus by reading it as the author's summa, as a boldly new kind of prose epic that casts an original light on the major political, religious, social, and literary debates of its era.
Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles by
Any student of Cervantes' literary production must at some point take into account the theories that inspired the plan and creation of Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda for, of all Cervantes' works, it is the one most directly related to the author's awareness of literary theory. This volume, in attempting to clarify the Persiles, traces the major influences reflected in the Renaissance literary theories which inspired it, examines Cervantes' ambivalent attitude toward those theories as revealed in his works, and provides a close examination of the structure of the Persiles. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England: The Tapestry Turned by
Cervantes in Seventeenth-century England garners well over a thousand English references to Cervantes and his works, thus providing the fullest and most intriguing early English picture ever made of the writings of Spain's greatest writer. Besides references to the nineteen books of Cervantes's prose available to seventeenth-century English readers (including four little-known abridgments), this new volume includes entries by such notable writers as BenJonson, John Fletcher, William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, and John Locke, as well as many lesser-known and anonymous writers. A reader will find, among others, a counterfeiter, a midwife, an astrologer, a princess, a diarist, and a Harvard graduate. Altogether this broad range ofwriters, famed and forgotten alike, brings to light not only sectarian and political tensions of the day, but also glimpses of the arts-of weaving, singing, acting, engraving, and painting. Even dancing, for there was a dance called the "Sancho Panzo".The volume opens with a wide-ranging Introduction that among other things traces the English reception of both Cervantes's Don Quixote and his Novelas ejemplares, including the part they played in English drama. In the main body of the work, individual items are arranged chronologically by year and, within that framework, alphabetically by author, thus providing little-known seventeenth-century evidence regarding the nature and breadth of British interest inCervantes in various decades. Thorough annotation helps readers to place individual entries in their historical, social, political, and in some instances religious contexts.The volume includes twenty-nine germane seventeenth-century pictures, an index of references to chapters in Don Quixote, and a full bibliography and index.
Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain by
The Iberian chivalric romance has long been thought of as an archaic, masculine genre and its popularity as an aberration in European literary history. Chivalry, Reading, and Women's Culture in Early Modern Spain contests this view, arguing that the surprisingly egalitarian gender politics of Spain's most famous romance of chivalry has guaranteed it a long afterlife. Amadís de Gaula had a notorious appeal for female audiences, and the early modern authors who borrowed from it varied in their reactions to its large cast of literate female characters. Don Quixote and other works that situate women as readers carry the influence of Amadís forward into the modern novel. When early modern authors read chivalric romance, they also read gender, harnessing the female characters of the source text to a variety of political and aesthetic purposes.
Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century by 
Don Quixote: Notes by
This is the story of a gentle knight, a man seeking truth and justice who goes beautifully mad in the process. Cervantes sets free our imagination and discovers for us a new quality about the human spirit.
Don Quixote de la Mancha by
'he thought it expedient and necessary that he should commence knight-errant, and wander through the world, with his horse and arms, in quest of adventures'Don Quixote, first published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is one of the world's greatest comic novels. Inspired by tales of chivalry, Don Quixote of La Mancha embarks on a series of adventures with his faithful servant Sancho Panza by his side. The novel has acquired mythic status and itsinfluence on modern fiction is profound.
Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain by
A new reading of madness in Don Quixote based on archival accounts of insanity.From the records of the Spanish Inquisition, Dale Shuger presents a social corpus of early modern madness that differs radically from the 'literary' madness previously studied. Drawing on over 100 accounts of insanity defences, many of which contain statements from a wide social spectrum - housekeepers, nieces, doctors, and barbers - as well as the testimonies of the alleged madmen and women themselves, Shuger argues that Cervantes' exploration of madness as experience is intimately linked to the questions about ethics, reason, will and selfhood that unreason presented for early modern Spaniards.In adapting, challenging and transforming these discourses, Don Quixote investigates spaces of interiority, confronts the limitations of knowledge - of the self and the world - and reflects on the social strategies for diagnosing and dealing with those we cannot understand. Shuger discovers an intimate connection between Cervantes's integration of this discourse of madness and his part in forging the new genre of the European novel.Key Features* Challenges the Foucauldian narrative of repression and the Bakhtinian narrative of liberation* Uses a historicist approach to show how Don Quixote engages, transforms and transcends the historical* Proposes a new reading of the development of the novel that comes from the unreasonable Baroque subject as opposed to the rational Enlightenment subject
Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote by
Cervantes' Don Quixote is the most widely read masterpiece in world literature, as appealing to readers today as four hundred years ago. In Fighting Windmills Manuel Durán and Fay R. Rogg offer a beautifully written excursion into Cervantes' great novel and trace its impact on writers and thinkers across centuries and continents. How did Cervantes write such a rich tale? Durán and Rogg explore the details of Cervantes' life, the techniques with which he constructed the novel, and the central themes of the adventures of Don Quixote and his earthy squire Sancho Panza. The authors then provide an insightful, panoramic view of Cervantes' powerful influence on generations of writers as diverse as Descartes, Voltaire, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Twain, and Borges.
Forms of Modernity: Don Quixote and Modern Theories of the Novel by
It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.
Heroic Forms: Cervantes and the Literature of War by
Before he was a writer, Miguel de Cervantes was a soldier. Enlisting in the Spanish infantry in 1570, he fought at the battle of Lepanto, was seized at sea and held captive by Algerian corsairs, and returned to Spain with a deep knowledge of military life. He understood the costs of heroism, the fragility of fame, and the power of the military culture of brotherhood. In Heroic Forms, Stephen Rupp connects Cervantes's complex and inventive approach to literary genre and his many representations of early modern warfare. Examining Cervantes's plays and poetry as well as his prose, Rupp demonstrates how Cervantes's works express his perceptions of military life and how Cervantes interpreted the experience of war through the genres of the era: epic, tragedy, pastoral, romance, and picaresque fiction.
Humble Story of Don Quixote: Reflections on the Birth of the Modern Novel by
In this original study by Cesáreo Bandera, the intimate connection between the simplicity and humility of the story and its greatness is explored. Other comparisons are also made: the story of the picaresque rogue, on the one hand, and the psychological insights of the pastoral novel, on the other.
Images in Mind: Lovesickness, Spanish Sentimental Fiction and Don Quijote by
Fifteenth-century Spanish sentimental fiction can be described as a palimpsest, a dense web of entangled, faded readings and a challenge to the reader. While the parameters of writing sentimental fiction and its textuality have been explored with great success, its readers and how they approached these works have been largely neglected. Based on a reconstruction of the medical notion of love-as-sickness, premodern reading habits, and interpretive strategies, this book approaches canonical works of sentimental romance from the perspective of a medical-sensitive reader. An analysis of Don Quijote silhouetted against the subtext of sentimental romance reveals how faculty psychology and lovesickness resonate in Golden Age literature.
International Don Quixote by
Ever since its appearance, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote has exerted a powerful influence on the artistic imagination all around the world. This cross-cultural volume offers important new readings of canonical reinterpretations of the Quixote: from Unamuno to Borges, from Ortega y Gasset to Calvino, from Mark Twain to Carlos Fuentes. But to the prestigious list of well-known authors who acknowledged Cervantes' influence, it also adds new and surprising names, such as that of Subcomandante Marcos, who gives a Cervantine twist to his Mexican Zapatista revolution. Attention is paid to successful contemporary authors such as Paul Auster and Ricardo Piglia, as well as to the forgotten voice of the Belgian writer Joseph Grandgagnage. The volume breaks new ground by taking into consideration Belgian music and Dutch translations, as well as Cervantine procedures in Terry Gilliam's Lost in La Mancha. In all, this book constitutes an indispensable guide for the further study of the Quixote's Nachleben and offers exciting proposals for rereading Cervantes.
Knowing Subjects: Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish Literature by
In Knowing Subjects, Barbara Simerka uses an emergent field of literary study-cognitive cultural studies-to delineate new ways of looking at early modern Spanish literature and to analyze cognition and social identity in Spain at the time. Simerka analyzes works by Cervantes and Gracían, as well as picaresque novels and comedias. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, she brings together several strands of cognitive theory and details the synergies among neurological, anthropological, and psychological discoveries that provide new insights into human cognition. Her analysis draws on Theory of Mind, the cognitive activity that enables humans to predict what others will do, feel, think, and believe. Theory of Mind looks at how primates, including humans, conceptualize the thoughts and rationales behind other people's actions and use those insights to negotiate social relationships. This capacity is a necessary precursor to a wide variety of human interactions-both positive and negative-from projecting and empathizing to lying and cheating. Simerka applies this theory to texts involving courtship or social advancement, activities in which deception is most prevalent-and productive. In the process, she uncovers new insights into the comedia (especially the courtship drama) and several other genres of literature (including the honor narrative, the picaresque novel, and the courtesy manual). She studies the construction of gendered identity and patriarchal norms of cognition-contrasting the perspectives of canonical male writers with those of recently recovered female authors such as María de Zayas and Ana Caro. She examines the construction of social class, intellect, and honesty, and in a chapter on Don Quixote, cultural norms for leisure reading at the time. She shows how early modern Spanish literary forms reveal the relationship between an urbanizing culture, unstable subject positions and hierarchies, and social anxieties about cognition and cultural transformation.
Lector Ludens: The Representation of Games and Play in Cervantes by
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, debating the acceptability of games and recreation was serious business. With Lector Ludens, Michael Scham uses Cervantes's Don Quijote and Novelas ejemplares as the basis for a wide-ranging exploration of early modern Spanish views on recreations ranging from cards and dice to hunting, attending the theater, and reading fiction. Shifting fluidly between modern theories of play, little-known Spanish treatises on leisure and games, and the evidence in Cervantes's own works, Scham illuminates Cervantes's intense fascination with games, play, and leisure, as well as the tensions in early modern Spain between the stern moralizing of the Counter-Reformation and the playfulness of Renaissance humanism.
Literary Mind of Medieval and Renaissance Spain by
The twelve essays in this fiorilegio of the work of Otis H. Green afford a representative view of the thought and scholarship of one of the world's foremost Hispanists. In each of them is developed some important facet of the intellectual milieu of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, reflecting Otis Green's life-long and wide-ranging quest for evidence that would broaden our understanding of those complex periods and correct the misapprehensions which have gathered about them. Included are important sections of his great work, Spain and the Western Tradition and essays from journals now difficult to obtain or out of print. This book provides a valuable introduction to Spanish thought and to the work of a scholar who has done much to elucidate it.
The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes by
Frequent and complex representations of jealousy in early modern Spanish literature offer symbolically rich and often contradictory images. Steven Wagschal examines these occurrences by illuminating the theme of jealousy in the plays of Lope de Vega, the prose of Miguel de Cervantes, and the complex poetry of Luis de Gongora. Noting the prevalence of this emotion in their work, he reveals what jealousy offered these writers at a time when Spain was beginning its long decline. Wagschal examines jealousy not only in canonical texts-The Jealous Old Man from Extremadura, The Commanders of Cordoba-but also in less-studied writings such as Lope de Vega's Jealous Arminda and In Love but Discreet and Gongora's "What of the Tall Envious Mountains." Through close analysis of numerous works, read in relation to one another, he demonstrates how the rhetorical elaboration of jealousy is linked to the ideological makeup of the texts-complicating issues of race, class, gender, morality, epistemology, and aesthetics-and proposes that the theme of jealousy offered a means for working through political and cultural problems involving power. Grounding his study in the work of thinkers ranging from Vives and Descartes to Freud and DeSousa, Wagschal also draws on classical antiquity to unravel myths that impinge upon the texts he considers. By showing that the greatest hyperbole of each of these writers is a representation of jealousy, he calls for a reconsideration of an era's literary giants, arguing not only for a reinterpretation of settled views on Cervantes but also for a reconsideration of Gongora's role in the development of modern European aesthetics. With its fresh insights into the interrelationships among literature, art, and society, Wagschal's study offers background theory for analyzing the emotions in literature and is the first book to treat an emotion in any national literature from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of mind. With its cogent insights into the jealous mind, it raises issues relevant both to the early modern period and to our contemporary world.
Love and the Law in Cervantes by
Reality is multi-layered, asserts the Reverend John Polkinghorne, and in this insightful book he explores various dimensions of the human encounter with reality. Through a well-reasoned and logical process, Polkinghorne argues that reality consists not only of the scientific processes of the natural world but also the personal dimension of human nature and its significance. He offers an integrated view of reality, encompassing a range of insights deriving from physics' account of causal structure, evolutionary understanding of human nature, the unique significance of Jesus of Nazareth, and the human encounter with God. The author devotes further chapters to specific problems and questions raised by the Christian account of divine reality. He discusses, for example, the nature of time and God's relation to it, the interrelationship of the world's faiths, the problem of evil, and practical ethical issues relating to genetic advances, including stem cell research. Continuing in his pursuit of a dialogue between science and theology that accords equal weight to the insights of each, Polkinghorne expands our understanding of the nature of reality and our appreciation of its complexity.
No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes by
The first biography to be aimed at the general reader as much as at students and historians, No Ordinary Man is a fascinating study of the life and work of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the writer known as the "Spanish Shakespeare" and author of the timeless classic Don Quixote. A renaissance man in all senses of the term, Cervantes was, in his time, an adventurer, spy, soldier, hostage, and creator of the first European novel. This biography is based on the latest original research and incorporates previously unpublished material on Cervantes’ long period of captivity in Algiers, his involvement in piracy in the Mediterranean, espionage, and the Spanish Armada, and his work for the Spanish government. Containing much information never before available in English, No Ordinary Man makes an important contribution to the understanding of this unique literary and historical figure.
The Novel According to Cervantes by 
On Wolves and Sheep: Exploring the Expression of Political Thought in Golden Age Spain by
With the rise of nationalism, and with it the nation-state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so arose new polemical issues. As the Spanish Empire expanded in the sixteenth century, theologians, jurists, artists and politicians commented on the morality and legitimacy of the imperial enterprise. With the increase in power of successive Spanish sovereigns from the Catholic Monarchs to Philip II (1556-98), followed by the decadence of the state through the reign of Charles II (1665-1700), political participants and observers alike put their thoughts on paper for mass dissemination. The study of epic poetry, poetry, drama, novels, rhetoric, imperial administrative documents and religion, reveals a plethora of means by which these people conveyed thoughts and opinions, often negatively critical, concerning Spain's monarchs, their imperial policies, the Catholic Church, the role of the nobility in government, and societal limitations. Providing innovative literary interpretations and revealing newly-discovered archival material, experts from US and UK universities have contributed original scholarly studies to this volume which delve deeper than academia has thus far into the operations of imperial Spain and the reactions of the people of the time. Studying works by the likes of Alonso de Ercilla, Juan de la Cueva, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Calderon de la Barca, among others, On Wolves and Sheep explores the various methods used in the Spanish Golden Age to voice political opinions and ideas.
Our Lord Don Quixote by
This comprehensive edition in English begins with a volume on the theme of Don Quixote, the greater part of which is devoted to The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, followed by sixteen essays on diverse aspects of the Quixote motif. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity by
Passing for Spain charts the intersections of identity, nation, and literary representation in early modern Spain. Barbara Fuchs analyzes the trope of passing in Don Quijote and other works by Cervantes, linking the use of disguise to the broader historical and social context of Counter-Reformation Spain and the religious and political dynamics of the Mediterranean Basin. In five lucid and engaging chapters, Fuchs examines what passes in Cervantes's fiction: gender and race in Don Quijote and "Las dos doncellas"; religion in "El amante liberal" and La gran sultana; national identity in the Persiles and "La española inglesa." She argues that Cervantes represents cross-cultural impersonation -- or characters who pass for another gender, nationality, or religion -- as challenges to the state's attempts to assign identities and categories to proper Spanish subjects. Fuchs demonstrates the larger implications of this challenge by bringing a wide range of literary and political texts to bear on Cervantes's representations. Impeccably researched, Passing for Spain examines how the fluidity of individual identity in early modern Spain undermined a national identity based on exclusion and difference.
Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art by
Quixotic Frescoes delves into the politics of imitation, self-censorship, religious ideology expressed through the pictorial, as well as the gendering of art as reflected in Cervantes' work.
Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes by
In this wide-ranging study E. Michael Gerli shows how Cervantes and his contemporaries ceaselessly imitated one another -- glossing works, dismembering and reconstructing them, writing for and against one another -- while playing sophisticated games of literary one-upmanship. The result was that literature in late Renaissance Spain was often more than a simple matter of source and imitation. It must be understood as a far more subtle, palimpsest-like process of forging endless series of texts from other texts, thus linking closely the practices of reading, writing, and rewriting. Like all major writers of the age, Cervantes was responding not just to specific literary traditions but to a broad range of texts and discourses. He expected his well-read audience to recognize his sources and to appreciate their transformations. The notion of writing as reading and reading as writing is thus central to an understanding of Cervantes' literary invention. As he created his works, he constantly questioned and reconfigured the authority of other texts, appropriating, combining, naturalizing, and effacing them, displacing them with his own themes, images, styles, and beliefs. Modern literary theory has confirmed what Cervantes and his contemporaries intuitively knew -- that reading and writing are closely linked dimensions of the literary enterprise. Reading Cervantes and his contemporaries in this way enables us to cojnprehend the craft, wit, irony, and subtle conceit that he at the heart of seventeenth-century Spanish literature.
Through the Shattering Glass: Cervantes and the Self-Made World by
OC By considering the dialectical nature of CervantesOCO work as a whole, Spadaccini and Talens broaden our understanding of the uniqueness of his art. . . . Through the Shattering Glass is a welcome and highly significant contribution to Cervantine scholarship.OCO Hispania. OC Offers an important new approach to CervantesOCOs works, which have been studied in toto by relatively few critics.OCO."
Tilting at Tradition: Problems of Genre in the Novels of Miguel de Cervantes and Charles Sorel by
"Don Quijote" and "Le Berger extravagant" criticize fiction but come in the shape of novels. Far from breaking with their respective traditions, they engage with the chivalric and the pastoral in a creative manner. Genre and imitation are key notions for situating these novels in literary history and in the uvres of Cervantes and Sorel. With emphasis on the continuity of each writer's approach, "Le Berger extravagant" is considered in the context of Sorel's aim to educate readers and avoid romance stereotypes, while the "Quijote" is read as an individual take on the chivalric novel, rejecting the Spanish tradition in favor of the ironic Italian "romanzo cavalleresco." Like Cervantes' "Galatea" and "Persiles," "Don Quijote" reflects a specific tradition which in turn serves to illuminate the famous book. This study offers interpretations of the two novels, but extends its scope toward the authors' other works and additional contemporary sources including Avellaneda's 1614 continuation of "Don Quijote."
Transnational Cervantes by
Theoretically eclectic and methodologically innovative, Transnational Cervantes opens up many avenues for research and debate, aiming to bring Cervantes' writings forward into the brave new world of our postcolonial age.
The Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote de la Mancha by
You can never have too much of a good thing--hundreds of enlightening proverbs from one of literature's greatest novels A browser's delight of proverbs, just in time for the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' classic, The Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote de la Mancha distills the timeless insight and humor of the masterpiece into a charming gift-size collection ideal for any lover of literature and great quotations. When Miguel de Cervantes first published Don Quixote de la Mancha in 1605 and 1615, he met with great success: It was the first-ever bestselling novel, going through six editions in the year of its publication. The masterpiece was beloved by so many because it resembled--and poked fun at--the cultural phenomena of its day. Following on the heels of the invention of the printing press, rising literacy rates, and the new global sensation of the novel, Don Quixote tells the story of a man driven mad from reading too much popular fiction--superhuman tales of warrior-heroes, magic weapons, and monstrous enemies. He goes in search of adventure, hoping to right all manner of wrongs and gain fame for his valorous deeds. Stories of wild superhuman adventure are still popular, especially on television and in the movies. To some extent, we are all Don Quixote, emboldened and driven mad by impossible media messages, fighting giants when they are only harmless windmills. We still have much to learn from the misadventures of the Man of La Mancha, and we are lucky to have his words of wisdom collected here. Decorated with rich illustrations and assembled with a historical introduction, the quotations are arranged according to theme for quick reference. From Love and Hope to Prudenceand Prosperity to Honor and Honesty, the themes will allow you to easily discover the perfect quote for any occasion. After 400 years, these sayings are still with us today and the best are gathered in this literary volume. In the words of the immortal Man of La Mancha, "Thou hast seen nothing yet." "There cannot be too much of a good thing?"
