Introduction: why read the Quixote? -- Chivalric romances and picaresque novels: antecedents of the Quixote -- Don Quixote and Sancho on the road: books and windmills -- Literature and life: the Quixote and Las Meninas -- Ugliness and improvisation: Juan Palomeque's Inn -- Modern authors: Cervantes and Ginés de Pasamonte -- Love and the law: interrupted stories -- Memory and narrative: stories within stories -- Love stories resolved: fictions and metafictions -- Fugitives from justice caught: restitutions as closure at The inn -- The senses of endings: finishing the Quixote, Part I -- On to Part II: the real and the bogus Quixote -- Renaissance (1605) and Baroque (1615) Quixotes -- Deceiving and undeceiving: Baroque Desengaño -- Don Quixote's doubles -- Present varieties of classical myths: Ovid, Cervantes, and Velasquez -- Caves and puppet shows: internal and external representations -- Don Quixote and Sancho in the hands of frivolous aristocrats -- Bearded ladies and flying horses: the duke's house of tricks -- King for a day: Sancho's Barataria -- Borders and ends: moriscos and bandits -- Dancing and defeat in Barcelona: Don Quixote heads home -- The meaning of the end: Don Quixote's death -- Cervantes' death and legacy.
Summary:
The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes' novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto González Echevarría's popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes' masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. González Echevarría addresses the novel's major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of predicaments: the individual's dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that would mesh with his desires. -- from back cover.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.