Cervantes and Modernity

Cervantes and Modernity
Author: Eric Clifford Graf
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780838756553

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.

Flaubert and Don Quijote

Flaubert and Don Quijote
Author: Soledad Fox
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2010-06-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1837642060

Tells the story of how Flaubert's admiration for Cervantes' Don Quijote unfolded, and how profoundly it shaped and influenced Flaubert's ambition and his approach to all his major works, beginning with his breakthrough novel "Madame Bovary".

Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times

Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times
Author: David Quint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780691114330

Offering a radical reading of 'Don Quijote', this work argues that it is much greater than the sum of its famous parts, discovering a unified narrative and deliberate thematic design in a novel long taught as the very definition of the picaresque and as a rambling succession of individual episodes.

Selections from Don Quixote

Selections from Don Quixote
Author: Miguel de Cervantes [Saavedra]
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2012-10-18
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0486117677

How Don Quixote was knighted, his valiant battle with the windmills, and much more. English translations on facing pages of original Spanish text capture the flavor and romance of this literary masterpiece.

Don Quijote, 2nd Norton Critical Edition

Don Quijote, 2nd Norton Critical Edition
Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780393617474

"Diana de Armas Wilson's introductory study captures the true essence of why Cervantes's novel has become a valuable piece of our shared cultural heritage. Humour, satire, and the religious and political conflicts that plagued the era all form part of Cervantes's great vision, and Wilson's study provides thorough analysis of why we still want to read the adventures of his would-be knight errant and his loyal squire over four centuries later." --AARON KAHN, University of Sussex

Don Quixote

Don Quixote
Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Publisher:
Total Pages: 274
Release: 1901
Genre:
ISBN:

Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha

Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha
Author: Eric Clifford Graf
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793601194

Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Manchapresents five major facets of liberty as they appear in the first modern novel. Analyzing the novelist’s attitudes towards religion, feminism, slavery, politics, and economics, Graf argues that Cervantes should be considered a major precursor to great liberal thinkers like Locke, Smith, Mill, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jefferson, Madison, and Twain. Graf indicates not only the medieval and early modern grounds for Cervantes’s ideas but also the ways in which he anticipated and influenced a wide range of modern articulations of personal freedom. Resistance to tyranny, freedom of conscience, the liberation of women, the abolition of slavery, and the principles of a free market economy are all still fundamental to modern Western Civilization, making Don Quiijote de la Mancha extremely relevant to today’s world. Anatomy of Liberty walks us through how Cervantes’s seminal work both foreshadowed and relates to today’s modern society.

Don Quixote and Catholicism

Don Quixote and Catholicism
Author: Michael McGrath
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2020-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1557539014

Four hundred years since its publication, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote continues to inspire and to challenge its readers. The universal and timeless appeal of the novel, however, has distanced its hero from its author and its author from his own life and the time in which he lived. The discussion of the novel’s Catholic identity, therefore, is based on a reading that returns Cervantes’s hero to Cervantes’s text and Cervantes to the events that most shaped his life. The authors and texts McGrath cites, as well as his arguments and interpretations, are mediated by his religious sensibility. Consequently, he proposes that his study represents one way of interpreting Don Quixote and acts as a complement to other approaches. It is McGrath’s assertion that the religiosity and spirituality of Cervantes’s masterpiece illustrate that Don Quixote is inseparable from the teachings of Catholic orthodoxy. Furthermore, he argues that Cervantes’s spirituality is as diverse as early modern Catholicism. McGrath does not believe that the novel is primarily a religious or even a serious text, and he considers his arguments through the lens of Cervantine irony, satire, and multiperspectivism. As a Roman Catholic who is a Hispanist, McGrath proposes to reclaim Cervantes’s Catholicity from the interpretive tradition that ascribes a predominantly Erasmian reading of the novel. When the totality of biographical and sociohistorical events and influences that shaped Cervantes’s religiosity are considered, the result is a new appreciation of the novel’s moral didactic and spiritual orientation.

Neo-Stoicism and Skepticism in Part One of Don Quijote

Neo-Stoicism and Skepticism in Part One of Don Quijote
Author: Daniel Lorca
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498522661

This book explains how Cervantes took advantage of neo-stoicism and skepticism to remove the authority of the romances of chivalry, which was a popular genre during his time. It also explains why his strategy, which would have been instantly recognizable during the period, is no longer effective: our current moral systems are significantly different from the moral systems that were influential during Cervantes’s time, and consequently, what used to be self-evident is no longer the case. Therefore, this book may be useful to the literary critic interested in the philosophical foundations of Don Quijote, to the moral philosopher interested in the differences between pre-enlightenment virtue-ethics and current moral systems, and also in the field of the history of ideas. Don Quijote offers a unique opportunity to observe changes in moral thinking throughout time because it is a universal book, discussed extensively throughout out the centuries, and therefore the on-going discussion offers strong evidence to discover how morality has changed, and continues to change, through time.