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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2018
Don Quixote is remembered as a dreamer, but he was, in the first instance for his creator, a cautionary tale about the bewitching danger of reading fiction. When Cervantes wrote what is considered to be the first modern novel, he did so having witnessed the explosion of printed texts thanks to the invention of the printing press, and his story chronicles what happens to hapless readers who are sucked into the dreamy world of fiction's unreality. Poor Don Quixote envisioned himself as a swashbuckling knight like those in the chivalric stories he consumed, and his metastasized imagination got him into heaps of trouble. He mistook inns for castles, flocks of sheep for advancing armies, and, most memorably, windmills for giants. Cervantes did not just give readers a unique portrait of an outlandish, romantic, and impractical schemer—he also inspired the word “quixotic” to describe others like him.
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