Cervantes and Modernity

Cervantes and Modernity PDF Author: Eric Clifford Graf
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756553
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
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.

Cervantes and Modernity

Cervantes and Modernity PDF Author: Eric Clifford Graf
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756553
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
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.

The Man Who Invented Fiction

The Man Who Invented Fiction PDF Author: William Egginton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635570247
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
“A heroic history of novel-reading itself.” --The Atlantic In the early seventeenth century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history. Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller, though. He invented a way of writing. This book is about how Cervantes came to create what we now call fiction, and how fiction changed the world. The Man Who Invented Fiction explores Cervantes's life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how his work--especially Don Quixote--radically changed the nature of literature and created a new way of viewing the world. Finally, it explains how that worldview went on to infiltrate art, politics, and science, and how the world today would be unimaginable without it. William Egginton has brought thrilling new meaning to an immortal novel.

Paranoia and Modernity

Paranoia and Modernity PDF Author: John C. Farrell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732420
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
"Don Quixote is the first great modern paranoid adventurer.... Grandiosity and persecution define the characters of Swift's Gulliver, Stendhal's Julien Sorel, Melville's Ahab, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Ibsen's Masterbuilder Solness, Strindberg's Captain (in The Father), Kafka's K., and Joyce's autobiographical hero Stephen Dedalus.... The all-encompassing conspiracy, very much in its original Rousseauvian cast, has become almost the normal way of representing society and its institutions since World War Two, giving impetus to heroic plots and counter-plots in a hundred films and in the novels of Burroughs, Heller, Ellison, Pynchon, Kesey, Mailer, DeLillo, and others."—from Paranoia and Modernity Paranoia, suspicion, and control have preoccupied key Western intellectuals since the sixteenth century. Paranoia is a dominant concern in modern literature, and its peculiar constellation of symptoms—grandiosity, suspicion, unfounded hostility, delusions of persecution and conspiracy—are nearly obligatory psychological components of the modern hero. How did paranoia come to the center of modern moral and intellectual consciousness? In Paranoia and Modernity, John Farrell brings literary criticism, psychology, and intellectual history to the attempt at an answer. He demonstrates the connection between paranoia and the long history of struggles over the question of agency—the extent to which we are free to act and responsible for our actions. He addresses a wide range of major authors from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, among them Luther, Bacon, Cervantes, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Swift, and Rousseau. Farrell shows how differently paranoid psychology looks at different historical junctures with different models of agency, and in the epilogue, "Paranoia and Postmodernism," he draws the implications for recent critical debates in the humanities.

Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times

Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times PDF Author: David Quint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069112227X
Category : Chivalry in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
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.

Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times

Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times PDF Author: David Quint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186464
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book offers a radically new reading of Don Quijote, understanding it as a whole much greater than the sum of its famous parts. David Quint discovers 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. Quint shows how repeated motifs and verbal details link the episodes, often in surprising and heretofore unnoticed ways. Don Quijote emerges as a work that charts and reflects upon the historical transition from feudalism to the modern times of a moneyed, commercial society. In Part One of the novel, this change is measured in a shift in the nature of erotic desire, and we find Don Quijote torn between his love for Dulcinea and his hopes to wed for wealth and social advancement. In Part Two, Don Quijote himself changes from anarchic madman to a gentler, wiser hero--a member of a middle class in the making. Throughout, Cervantes meditates on the literary form that he is inventing as a response to modernity, questioning the novel's relationship to other genres and the place of heroism and imagination within stories of everyday life. A new and coherent guide through the maze-like structure of Don Quijote, this book invites readers to appreciate the perennial modernity of Cervantes's masterpiece---a novel that confronts times not so distant from our own.

Forms of Modernity

Forms of Modernity PDF Author: Rachel Lynn Schmidt
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442642513
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory. Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels.

Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind

Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind PDF Author: Isabel Jaén
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780415785471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The interrelation of mind and literature is a relatively unexplored topic in the field of early modern studies. Moreover, there has been insufficient dialogue between humanists and scientists on how fictional and scientific accounts of the mind contribute together to the view that early modern culture had of human psychology. The intent of this collection is to fill this gap by bringing together, not simply humanists and scientists, but more specifically researchers who have a consistent record of interdisciplinary research on the topic at hand: Spanish medical doctors who have amply investigated early modern medicine and psychology in relation to the literature of the time (specifically Cervantes) as well as Cervantes scholars who have explored his work in relation to cognitive theories. Such diversity of voices makes Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind the first truly interdisciplinary anthology in the field of Cervantes' studies, showing how scholars who put literary and scientific discourses in dialogue can help us further understand both Cervantes' work and early modern culture. Finally, the book serves to disseminate important research on the history of Spanish science carried out by renowned medical doctors from Spain, whose work, often written in Spanish, is virtually unknown outside of Spain. These scientists are representatives of a long tradition, beginning in the Renaissance, of doctors working at the crossroads of medicine and the humanities.

Forms of Modernity

Forms of Modernity PDF Author: Rachel Schmidt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781487545871
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' Don Quixote is as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory.

Don Quixote

Don Quixote PDF Author: Cervantes
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1603841156
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 892

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Book Description
James Montgomery's new translation of Don Quixote is the fourth already in the twenty-first century, and it stands with the best of them. It pays particular attention to what may be the hardest aspect of Cervantes's novel to render into English: the humorous passages, particularly those that feature a comic and original use of language. Cervantes would be proud. --Howard Mancing, Professor of Spanish, Purdue University and Vice President, Cervantes Society of America

Don Quixote

Don Quixote PDF Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description