An introduction to Cervantes's complex masterpiece.
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 word-play and narrative manner, and the historical
evolution of posterity's interpretation of the novel, with particular
attention to its influence on the theory of the genre.
One of the principal questions tackled is the paradoxical incongruity
between Cervantes's conception of his novel as a light work
ofentertainment, without any explicitly acknowledged profundity, and
posterity's view of it as a universally symbolic masterpiece,
revolutionary in the context of its own time, and capable of meaning
something new and different to each succeeding age.
ANTHONY CLOSE, now retired, was Reader in Spanish at the University of
Cambridge.