This book relates Cervantes's poetics of comic fiction to the common framework of assumptions, values, and ideas held by Spaniards of the Golden Age about the comic and the kinds of writing which expressed it. This collective mentality underwent significant evolution in the period 1500 to 1630, and the factors which caused it are reflected in the ways in which the major comic genres--satire, the picaresque, the comedia, the novella--are re-launched, transformed, and theoretically rationalized around 1600, the moment when Don Quijote and Cervantes's most famous novelas were written. Though...

Anthony Close's study places Don Quixote in the context of Cervantes' life and literary career, and in the book's cultural and social background. It focuses primarily on the central problems of Cervantine comedy, the use of burlesque, the presentation of characters through dialogue, the narrator's viewpoint, the virtuoso play with registers, and the complex and elusive irony. Using detailed analysis of individual passages, Dr Close shows how the moral themes of the novel are distilled in its humour, and in the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho. He also gives particular attention to the...

The purpose of this book is to help the English-speaking reader, with an interest in Spanish literature but without specialised knowledge of Cervantes, to understand his long and complex masterpiece: its major themes, its structure, and the inter-connections between its component parts. Beginning from a review of Don Quixote's relation to Cervantes's life, literary career, and its social and cultural context, Anthony Close goes on to examine the structure and distinctive nature of Part I (1605) and Part II (1615), the conception of the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho, Cervantes's...

Don Quixote has been widely read and discussed outside Spain. Interpreted before 1800 as a burlesque of chivalric romances, and implicitly described as such by Cervantes himself, it was given a sentimentalised and seriously philosophical interpretation by the German Romantics. Dr Close is essentially concerned with the question why this unhistorical and subjective reading of the novel prevailed, first in Europe, then in Spain. He examines the stages by which, from 1860, it progressively supplanted in Spain the hitherto dominant neo-classical interpretation, and shows how this process kept...