Chapter 6 examines the force of lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment in the Galatea. At the confluence of verse and prose, allegory and history, mimesis and poiesis, this chapter treats the Galatea and contemporary works, beginning with the 1582 transition from verse to prose in Pedro de Padilla’s Églogas pastoriles (Seville). While the Galatea has often been dismissed in scholarship as a partially formed and immature work, or reinterpreted through standard approaches to the DQ, this chapter studies the chronotopic dynamism of Cervantes’ first prose fiction through the narrative emplotment of Lauso’s lyric interior. It is attuned to the sophisticated narrative architecture of an unprecedented capacity to juggle multiple lyric temporalities within a single narrative landscape. The Galatea lent novelistic immediacy to the timeless retreat of the pastoral through the use of lyric subjectivity. As a meditation on the nature of love and lyric subjectivity inherent in Pastoral Petrarchism, in the Galatea the figura of the poet as literary character was fully developed in Lauso. As a novel in key, the Galatea not only pertained to the fábulas of Cervantes’ literary milieu, it also wove a tapestry of narrativized lyric intersubjectivity necessary to the conception of the first modern novel.

The Introduction begins with the situating of the DQ at a turning point in Foucault’s History of Madness in order to draw out the fate of the Renaissance poet as that which Cervantes’ modern novel most obviously and most covertly dramatizes. Positing the unknown history of the Don Quijote as the oft-elided career of nearly four decades that Cervantes spent as a sixteenth-century author of pastoral verse and prosimetric poetry, the Introduction reconfigures the history of the modern novel through the reconstruction of sixteenth-century poetics, the poetics of Pastoral Petrarchism. While Velázquez’s Las Meninas has often been studied as a paradigmatic work of the transition from Renaissance to Baroque (oft-coupled with the DQ), the Introduction returns to Velázquez’s painting of El bufón llamado don Juan de Austria in order to more closely examine Cervantes’ role in this transition as an aging contemporary of the original Don Juan de Austria, a favorite patron of poet-soldiers. Engaging both the figure of the poet and the figure of the modern madman in the transformations of the DQ as exemplar of the modern novel and the modern subject, the Introduction lays the historical foundations and theoretical stakes of Cervantes the Poet.

The Coda engages prior theories of the novel which have unwittingly touched on lyric subjectivity as the motor of genesis in modern fiction qua the DQ. The Coda returns to Leo Spitzer’s seminal article “Linguistic Perspectivism in the DQ” (1948), in which the negotiation of lexicons also invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of heteroglossia and polysemy in the Dialogic Imagination (1930s and 1940s, pub. 1975), and Gyorgy Lukács’ understanding of a rift between interiority and exteriority as transcendental homelessness in the Theory of the Novel (1915). While several of the insights found in their work hold true, their observations often unwittingly point towards the lyric, rather than epic, features of the novel as a modern literary genre. Their insights show that novelistic fiction is everywhere impossible without the lyric subjectivity at work in the practice of sixteenth-century Pastoral Petrarchism, in particular in the Galatea. In his conception of the modern novel, Cervantes preserves lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment through the transformation of the figura of the poet into the modern madman (Alonso Quijano/don Quijote). This figura of the poet as modern madman is not particular to the DQ but inhabits the “center” of the modern subject.The DQ allows us to consider the foundational division of the modern subject: reason and madness.

“The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice.”