"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

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.

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Although best known the world over for his masterpiece novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the antics of the would-be knight-errant and his simple squire only represent a fraction of the trials and tribulations, both in the literary world and in society at large, of this complex man. Poet, playwright, soldier, slave, satirist, novelist, political commentator, and literary outsider, Cervantes achieved a minor miracle by becoming one of the rarest of things in the Early-Modern world of letters: an international best-seller during his lifetime, with his great novel being translated into multiple languages before his death in 1616. The principal objective of The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes is to create a resource in English that provides a fully comprehensive overview of the life, works, and influences of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). 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, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and France offer their expertise with the most up-to-date research and interpretations to complete this wide-ranging, but detailed, compendium of a writer not known for much other than his famous novel outside of the Spanish-speaking world. Here we explore his famous novelDon Quixote de la Mancha, his other prose works, his theatrical output, his poetry, his sources, influences, and contemporaries, and finally reception of his works over the last four hundred years.

From Theocritus’ Idylls to James Cameron’s Avatar, Arcadia remains an enduring presence in world culture and a persistent source of creative inspiration. Why does Arcadia still exercise such a powerful pull on the imagination? This book responds by arguing that in sixteenth-century Europe, a dramatic shift took place in imagining Arcadia. The traditional visions of Arcadia collided and fused with romance, the new experimental form of prose fiction, producing a hybrid, dynamic world of change and transformation. Emphasizing matters of fictional function and world-making over generic classification, Imagining Arcadia in Renaissance Romance analyzes the role of romance as a catalyst in remaking Arcadia in five, canonical sixteenth-century texts: Sannazaro’s Arcadia; Montemayor’s La Diana; Cervantes’ La Galatea; Sidney’s Arcadia; and Lope de Vega’s Arcadia. Collins’ analyses of the re-imagined Arcadia in these works elucidate the interplay between timely incursions into the fictional world and the timelessness of art, highlighting issues of freedom, identity formation, subjectivity and self-fashioning, the intersection of public and private activity, and the fascination with mortality. This book addresses the under-representation of Spanish literature in Early Modern literary histories, especially regarding the rich Spanish contribution to the pastoral and to idealizing fiction in the West. Companion chapters on Cervantes and Sidney add to the growing field of Anglo-Spanish comparative literary studies, while the book’s comparative and transnational approach extends discussion of the pastoral beyond the boundaries of national literary traditions. This book’s innovative approach to these fictional worlds sheds new light on Arcadia’s enduring presence in the collective imagination today.

Law and History in Cervantes' Don Quixote is a deep consideration of the intellectual environment that gave rise to Cervantes' seminal work. Susan Byrne demonstrates how Cervantes synthesized the debates surrounding the two most authoritative discourses of his era – those of law and history – into a new aesthetic product, the modern novel. Byrne uncovers the empirical underpinnings of Don Quixote through a close philological study of Cervantes' sly questioning of and commentary on these fields. As she skilfully demonstrates, while sixteenth-century historiographers and jurists across southern Europe sought the philosophical nexus of their fields, Cervantes created one through the adventures of a protagonist whose history is all about justice. As such, Law and History in Cervantes' Don Quixote illustrates how Cervantes' art highlighted the inconsistencies of juridical-historical texts and practice, as well as anticipated the ultimate resolution of their paradoxes.

Graf argues that the doubts expressed by both historicists and postmodernists regarding the progressive nature of Don Quijote are exaggerated. Neither do interpretations that abstain from this debate by emphasizing authorial ambivalence or positioning the novel at a crossroads seem as responsible as they once did. Beyond these skeptical and neutral alternatives, there are key steps forward in Cervantes's worldview. These four essays detail Don Quijote's anticipations of many of the same ideas and values that drive today's multiculturalism, feminism, secularism, and materialism. An important thesis here is that the Enlightenment remains the best vantage point from which to appreciate the novel's relation to the discourses of such movements. Thus Voltaire's Candide (1759), Feijoo's Defensa de las mujeres (1726), and Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) are each shown to be logical extensions of some of Cervante's most fundamental propositions. Finally, this book will still be of interest to specialists immune to the ideological anxieties arising from debates over notions of modernity. Graf also explores the interrelated meaning of a number of Don Quijote's symbols, characters, and episodes, pinpoints several of the novel's most important classical and medieval sources, and unveils for us its first serious English reader.