Miguel de Cervantes, Early Modern Spain, and the Challenges to the Meaning of Islam

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Don Quijote

AbstractMiguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) wrote a number of texts, among them Don Quijote and El amante liberal [The generous lover], that critique the narrow optics and false binaries that govern the description of both Christian and Muslim identity. In this essay I show how the strategies of dismantling binaries work in the case of El amante liberal in particular, and how the current scholarship on early modern Spain's (and especially Cervantes') engagement with Islam is a fruitful place to challenge the monolithic visions that command depictions of Islam. Given Cervantes' role as a pioneer for modernity in fiction, his complex portrayals of Islam also relate to the advent of modernity in Western literature.

Cervantes, Anti-Romance, and the Novella

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brean Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Novelas Ejemplares ◽  
Don Quijote ◽  
English Novel ◽  
La Mancha ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Modern Sense

This chapter looks at how Miguel de Cervantes' writing influenced the genesis and development of the English novel. His most influential writings, Don Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares of 1613, were published at a time of exceptional English interest in Spanish culture — a country reopened to diplomatic relations in 1604 after nearly half a century of continuous rivalry and warfare. In destroying the enchantment of romance, Cervantes Saavedra's El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605–15) fatally undermined those values upon which the glory of the Spanish Golden Age rested, and ushered in an era of decadence and decline. However, he was not the first writer to parody knight-errantry. Nevertheless, a persuasive case can be made that the publication of Don Quijote was one crucial factor in the creation of an early modern sense of what medievalism was.

scholarly journals Las ninfas de los ríos: Echo(s) zwischen Miguel de Cervantes, Paul Valéry und Jorge Luis Borges als Grundlegung einer Theorie literarischer Resonanz

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-64
Author(s):  
Anita Traninger
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
First Passage ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Don Quijote ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Voice

Abstract The article takes as its starting point a reading of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, focusing on the first passage from Cervantes’ Quijote that is quoted verbatim in the text. An invocation of the river nymphs and the nymph Echo („las ninfas de los ríos, la húmida y dolorosa Eco“), it is singled out by the narrator as bearing the voice of Pierre Menard despite having never been attempted by him in his project of writing Don Quijote again. I argue that the invocation of Echo does not point to a duplication of the text. Rather, Echo’s early modern acceptation, that of a dialogue partner that not only answers, but answers back and says different things with the same words, encapsulates Menard’s project as such and, beyond that, a theory of literary resonance. Paul Valery’s poems and essays, to which Borges’ story variously alludes, underpin this reading of Echo as the patron saint of a theory of resonance that accounts for the necessary openness of literary texts to deviant interpretations, in particular those that could not have been foreseen or desired by their authors.

Cervantes and Warfare

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Stacey Triplette
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Civilian Life ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Military Action ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Personal Career

Miguel de Cervantes travelled the Mediterranean as a professional soldier, fought in the battle of Lepanto in 1571, and endured five years in captivity in Algiers before he published his first literary work in 1585. References to warfare appear throughout Cervantes’s literary production, serving as a metaphor, background, or interpolation, even in texts that concern themselves primarily with civilian life. Though Cervantes celebrates his personal career as a soldier, he subjects the theme of warfare more generally to the irony and distance with which he treats other cultural phenomena of early modern Spain. In all his texts, Cervantes expresses a concern for justice in military action. For the individual soldier, citizen, or knight-errant, personal heroism and correct behaviour appear to be possible, but on the scale of the nation, warfare leads inevitably to financial opportunism and human suffering.

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