Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Cervantes's Exemplary Prologue
- 2 Enchantment and Irony: Reading La gitanilla
- 3 The Play of Desire: El amante liberal and El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros
- 4 Language as Object of Representation in Rinconete y Cortadillo
- 5 Now you see it, now you … see it again? The Dynamics of Doubling in La española inglesa
- 6 Soldiers and Satire in El licenciado Vidriera
- 7 Exemplary Rape: The Central Problem of La fuerza de la sangre
- 8 Remorse, Retribution and Redemption in La fuerza de la sangre: Spanish and English Perspectives
- 9 Free-Thinking in El celoso extremeño
- 10 Performances of Pastoral in La ilustre fregona: Games within the Game
- 11 Cervantine Traits in Las dos doncellas and La señora Cornelia
- 12 The Peculiar Arrangement of El casamiento engañoso and El coloquio de los perros
- 13 Eutrapelia and Exemplarity in the Novelas ejemplares
- 14 ‘Entre parejas anda el juego’ / ‘All a Matter of Pairs’: Reflections on some Characters in the Novelas ejemplares
- Appendix I Synopses
- Appendix II Further Reading
- Index
1 - Cervantes's Exemplary Prologue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Cervantes's Exemplary Prologue
- 2 Enchantment and Irony: Reading La gitanilla
- 3 The Play of Desire: El amante liberal and El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros
- 4 Language as Object of Representation in Rinconete y Cortadillo
- 5 Now you see it, now you … see it again? The Dynamics of Doubling in La española inglesa
- 6 Soldiers and Satire in El licenciado Vidriera
- 7 Exemplary Rape: The Central Problem of La fuerza de la sangre
- 8 Remorse, Retribution and Redemption in La fuerza de la sangre: Spanish and English Perspectives
- 9 Free-Thinking in El celoso extremeño
- 10 Performances of Pastoral in La ilustre fregona: Games within the Game
- 11 Cervantine Traits in Las dos doncellas and La señora Cornelia
- 12 The Peculiar Arrangement of El casamiento engañoso and El coloquio de los perros
- 13 Eutrapelia and Exemplarity in the Novelas ejemplares
- 14 ‘Entre parejas anda el juego’ / ‘All a Matter of Pairs’: Reflections on some Characters in the Novelas ejemplares
- Appendix I Synopses
- Appendix II Further Reading
- Index
Summary
This essay will try to show that the ‘Prólogo al lector’ (Prologue to the Reader) that prefaces the Novelas ejemplares is exemplary in its appropriateness to the stories it introduces. As one would expect from the introduction to any book, it serves the purely functional purpose of providing readers with general information about what they are about to read, but beyond that, and more unusually, for those who do not refuse its challenges, it also offers an induction into the reading skills, or habits of mind, that they will require if they are to properly understand and enjoy the novelas. In other words, the readerly expertise required to understand the enigmas of the Prologue is closely analogous to that demanded by the stories themselves. It is commonplace to observe that Cervantes liked to experiment with the conventions associated with the various literary genres of his time. The Novelas ejemplares are a prime example of this love of literary experimentation, and the first sense in which the Prologue is exemplary as an introduction to them is in its artful exploitation of the conventions of the genre. Therefore, before considering the content and structure of this prologue, and the other ways in which it is exemplary, it is appropriate to begin by briefly describing those conventions and outlining Cervantes's approach to them as evidenced in the introductions he provided for some of his other works.
Cervantes and the Prologue Tradition
As George McSpadden has made clear, Spanish readers in Cervantes's time (and before it) had come to expect much more from a prologue than mere information:
Spanish authors, especially through the Golden Age, wrote their prefaces with merriment, wit, energy and imagination. They would take a difficult situation which confronts authors in general, namely that of introducing their books to their readers, and make of it an opportunity for playful, humorous, literary art, and they thus created an original little literary genre, the prólogo.
Traditionally, the primary purpose of the prologue, from the author's point of view, was the captatio benevolentiae: the ‘capturing’ of the goodwill of the reader.
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- A Companion to Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares , pp. 47 - 68Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005
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