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
Introduction
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
Cervantes's most famous work is undoubtedly Don Quijote, which was published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. Next to the Quijote his Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Tales), which appeared in 1613, have attracted most critical attention, but, except in the case of professional academic scholars and their students, they have always remained relatively little known outside the Spanish-speaking world. It is the aim of this Companion volume to introduce them to a wider English-speaking audience. This Introduction will attempt to give a general overview of the Novelas ejemplares – their dating, sources and generic affiliations – as well as of the Spanish and broader European literary-historical environments in which Cervantes wrote them, with special attention being devoted to the related and much-discussed questions of the coherence of the stories as a collection and their exemplary nature.
Cervantes and His Work
Cervantes was born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, a small university town close to Madrid. His family seems to have moved around Spain during his childhood, and it is known that his father, a surgeon, was living in Seville in 1564. The praise of the education offered in the Jesuit college in Seville in the last of the Novelas ejemplares, El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros (The Deceitful Marriage and The Dialogue of the Dogs) has been used to support speculation that he may have received a Jesuit education there. The family moved to Madrid in 1566, and in 1568 Cervantes published his first work, a poem in praise of the newly-born Princess Catalina, the second daughter of Philip II. In 1569 he contributed four poems to an anthology compiled by Juan López de Hoyos to commemorate the death in October 1568 of the King's third wife, Isabel de Valois. In this volume, López de Hoyos, the rector of an academy called the Estudio de la Villa, refers to him as ‘nuestro caro y amado discípulo’ (our dear and beloved pupil), showing that although Cervantes never received a university education, he did, even for a short period, pursue the equivalent of third-level studies.
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- A Companion to Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares , pp. 1 - 46Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005
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