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.
Inhoudsopgave
Introduction
Cervantes’s Life, Time and Literary Career
The Adventures and Episodes of Part I
The Personalities of Don Quixote and Sancho: their Genesis, Inter-Relations hip and Evolution
Wit, Colloquialisms and Narrative Manner
The Adventures and Episodes of Part II
Don Quixote and the Modern Novel
Guide to Further Reading
Bibliography
Index
Meer e-boeken van dezelfde auteur (s) / Editor
6.449 E-boeken in deze categorie
