Cervantes the Poet
Cervantes the Poet
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Cervantes the Poet travels from the court of Isabel de Valois to Rome, Naples, Palermo, Algiers, and Madrid's barrio de las letras. Recovering Cervantes' nearly forty-year literary career before the publication of Don Quijote, Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer demonstrates the cultural, literary, and theoretical significance of Cervantes' status as a late-sixteenth-century itinerant poet. This study recovers the generative literary milieus and cultural practices of Spain's most famous novelist in order to posit a new theory of the modern novel as an organic transformation of lyric practices native to the late-sixteenth century and Cervantes' own literary outlook.
- Unearths previously unknown or untreated manuscript sources to broaden and deepen our understanding of Cervantes, Golden Age literary history and culture, and the genesis of the modern novel
- Brings together cultural and literary history, grounding theoretical claims in historical context and making literary techniques and interpretive frameworks concrete in the materiality of text and cultural practice
- Revitalizes and transforms canonical theories of the novel – such as those developed by Lukács and Bakhtin – and illuminates role of lyric subjectivity in the genesis of the modern novelistic character, offering insights on the modern subject and on our own status as such
Reviews & endorsements
‘Ponce-Hegenauer has contributed something quite new and important to our understanding of the genealogy of Cervantes' Don Quijote: that the origins of the Quijote (and by extension, of the modern novel) lie in the mixed prose-lyric forms best exemplified by the Renaissance pastoral novel-and not, as is commonly supposed, in the epic or in the books of chivalry. Cervantes the Poet represents an impressive scholarly achievement.' Anthony J. Cascardi, University of California, Berkeley
‘Cervantes the Poet offers a truly innovative approach to Miguel de Cervantes, helping us to better understand the poetics of his masterpiece, Don Quijote, while really focusing on the first twenty years of his life and literary career, emphasizing the bonds between lyric and subjectivity (as well as madness), which overlap with the modern novel's main narrative goals. Cervantes the Poet is an outstanding monograph that promises to carve an important space for itself in the crowded field of Cervantes studies.' Rodrigo Cacho, University of Cambridge
‘A richly detailed reconstruction of the author’s life and Spain’s fertile cultural landscape, Cervantes the Poet offers a bold reassessment of the origin of the European novel.’ Ian Ellison, Times Literary Supplement
Product details
May 2023Hardback
9781316517390
300 pages
235 × 158 × 20 mm
0.55kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Mimesis in the court of gentlewomen: the pastoral fabric of everyday life
- 2. Exalted apostrophes: Cervantes in the court of Isabel de Valois
- 3. Figura of the Poet: pastoral Petrarchism as the practice of ingenious gentlemen
- 4. The form of the beauty: lyric lovers in the Mediterranean world
- 5. The poet as literary character: eclogues and encomia in Madrid
- 6. The literary character as poet: lyric subjectivity, chronotopic dynamism, and plot in the Galatea.
