456. Touch Me With Your Madness: Cervantes’ Don Quixote
Why do critics consider Don Quixote the first “modern” novel, and what does it tell us about the aesthetics of fiction?
Themes:
• E. Grossman (trans.), Cervantes: Don Quixote (New York: 2003).
• C. Jarvis (trans.), Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Don Quixote de la Mancha (Oxford: 1992).
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• S. Boyd, T.L. Darby, and T. O’Reilly (eds), The Art of Cervantes in Don Quixote: Critical Essays (Cambridge: 2019).
• A.J. Cascardi, “Two Kinds of Knowing in Plato, Cervantes, and Aristotle,” Philosophy
and Literature 24 (2000), 406-23.
• A.J. Cascardi (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (Cambridge: 2002).
• A. Close, Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age (Cambridge: 1977).
• D. De Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (Oxford: 2001).
• M. de Unamuno, The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, trans. A Kerrigan (Princeton: 1967).
• W. Egginton, The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (New York: 2017).
• A. Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes (Barcelona: 1972).
• A.K. Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle, and the Persiles (Princeton: 1970).
• A.K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Humanist Vision (Princeton: 1982).
• S. Gilman, The Novel According to Cervantes (Berkeley: 1989).
• A.M. Kahn (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes (Oxford: 2021).
• D. McCrory, No Ordinary Man: The Life and Times of Miguel de Cervantes (London: 2002).
• L. Nelson Jr (ed.), Cervantes: a Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: 1969).
• D. Quint, Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote (Princeton: 2003).
• E.C. Riley, Cervantes’ Theory of the Novel (Oxford: 1962).
• P.E. Russell, Cervantes (Oxford: 1985).
Comments
Novels
Excellent, Peter. This great classic novel is surely an example of what Mario Vargas Llosa writes: “The lies in novels are not gratuitous, they fill in the insufficiencies of life. Thus, when life seems full and absolute, and men, out of an all-consuming faith, are resigned to their destinies, novels perform no service at all. Religious cultures produce poetry and theater, not novels. Fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis, in which it’s necessary to believe in something, in which the unitarian, trusting and absolute vision has been supplanted by a shattered one and an uncertainty about the world we inhabit and the afterworld.”
The great novelist from Peru also notes that readers of novels can't be manipulated, a critically important strength particularly in the current political climate in the US, a country and society where millions of men and women are dulled by TV stupor, booze, and opioids.
Cervantes'Don Quixote
Peter.. you start by saying Cervantes- Don Quixote , the only plausible writer to Shakespeare... i'm sorry but Francis Bacon was the writer behind the two figureheads: Shakespeare & Cervantes.. you can read my book ( a translation of my 2015 dutch publication) : The deciphering of the Don Quixote & the unmasking of Avellaneda.. 2022. But "the subject is not for those who have developed a mental block before they examine the evidence.. ( Cyrus H. Gordon before the bible). But it is not important who wrote the pieces, but for what purpose. Francis Bacon, a great philosopher wrote often under pseudonym. The ultimate goal of science is of a practical nature. F.B. wanted to be serviceable, so that his country, his people and even humanity would live better...
Jettie H. van den Boom
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