Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel

"Don Quixote" and the Poetics of the Novel is a probing and sophisticated analysis of the literary form of Cervantes's masterpiece which offers challenging implications for critical theory and practice. In the course of reconstructing the design of Don Quixote, Felix Martinez-Bonati provides a persuasive account of the text's inconsistencies and implausibilities.In response to the classic question whether Don Quixote is true to life, Martinez-Bonati defines it as an unrealistic allegory of realism. He maintains that Cervantes's novel presents an ironized universe of literature that plays with the contradictions of traditional wisdom and the variety and limitations of literary forms - including those of verisimilitude. Drawing on Aristotle's Poetics, on the idealist and romantic traditions that originate in Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Coleridge, and on contemporary critical theory, Martinez-Bonati describes the stylistic matrix of Don Quixote as a combination of semirealism, romance fantasy, and comedy, and he offers an interpretation of the historical and existential meaning of such a configuration. He provides fresh insights into the character of Cervantes's imagination, the composition and unity of Don Quixote, and its generic structure, rhetorical force, and metafictional intentionality."Don Quixote" and the Poetics of the Novel will be welcomed by Hispanists, comparatists, and others with an interest in literary theory, Renaissance studies, and the development of the novel.