Cervantes the Poet
The Don Quijote, Poetic Practice, and the Conception of the First Modern Novel

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.

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'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

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Product details

• Date Published: May 2023
• format: Hardback
• isbn: 9781316517390
• length: 300 pages

• dimensions: 235 x 158 x 20 mm
• weight: 0.55kg
• availability: Available