Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Two sets of related issues prompt this study: the birth of the New World in European consciousness and the rise of the Cervantine novel in Spain. The conquest, exploration, and colonization of the Indies resonate through Cervantes's two novels, Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the Persiles (1617), both fortified by imperialism. Cervantes begins publishing in the 1580s, just as the might of imperial Spain turned from Europe towards the Atlantic. Twice refused emigration papers to America - which he depicts as the 'refuge and haven of all the desperate men of Spain' - Cervantes turns to fiction. His novels internalize many colonial discourses and at least four genres implicated in Spain's New World enterprise: the Books of Chivalry, the utopias, the colonial war epic, and American ethnohistory. The first full-length study to move beyond an inventory of Cervantes's references to the Indies - to Mexico and Peru, cannibals and tobacco, parrots and alligators - this book interprets his novels as a transatlantic, cross-cultural, and multi-linguistic achievement.
Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World is a welcome addition to the Cervantes bibliography and will serve as a source of inspiration for younger scholars who wish to continue the on-going renewal of Spanish peninsular studies. It also will be of interest to comparatists and Latin American colonial experts who will find in it a preliminary cartography for connecting the multiple global circuits that made up Spanish imperial culture. * Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America *
Conceived within a refreshingly comparative framework ... What is most promising about Wilson's approach is her focus on a series of genres. * Journal of Romance Studies *
Exceedingly rich, sophisticated, and knowing, her analyses exemplify the very hybridity that she praises as "inescapable" in Cervantes's literary trajectory ... should be required reading for specialists who wish to access the role of Spain and the New World in the history of the novel. * Choice *
A deftly written and unfailingly thought-provoking book. * B. W. Ife, Times Literary Supplement *
Engaging ... rich, sometimes playful, intertextual readings. * Bulletin of Spanish Studies *
ISBN: 9780198160052
Dimensions: 224mm x 145mm x 19mm
Weight: 437g
270 pages