Cervantes the Poet
The Don Quijote, Poetic Practice, and the Conception of the First Modern Novel

Through analysis of Cervantes' status as an itinerant poet, this book overturns conventional theories of the modern novel's genesis.

Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer (Author)

9781316517390, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 2023

300 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'Cervantes the Poet offers a truly innovative approach to Miguel de Cervantes, helping us to better understand the poetics of his masterpiece, Don Quijote, while really focusing on the first twenty years of his life and literary career, emphasizing the bonds between lyric and subjectivity (as well as madness), which overlap with the modern novel's main narrative goals. Cervantes the Poet is an outstanding monograph that promises to carve an important space for itself in the crowded field of Cervantes studies.' Rodrigo Cacho, University of Cambridge

Cervantes the Poet travels from the court of Isabel de Valois to Rome, Naples, Palermo, Algiers, and Madrid's barrio de las letras. Recovering Cervantes' nearly forty-year literary career before the publication of Don Quijote, Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer demonstrates the cultural, literary, and theoretical significance of Cervantes' status as a late-sixteenth-century itinerant poet. This study recovers the generative literary milieus and cultural practices of Spain's most famous novelist in order to posit a new theory of the modern novel as an organic transformation of lyric practices native to the late-sixteenth century and Cervantes' own literary outlook.

1. Mimesis in the court of gentlewomen: the pastoral fabric of everyday life
2. Exalted apostrophes: Cervantes in the court of Isabel de Valois
3. Figura of the Poet: pastoral Petrarchism as the practice of ingenious gentlemen
4. The form of the beauty: lyric lovers in the Mediterranean world
5. The poet as literary character: eclogues and encomia in Madrid
6. The literary character as poet: lyric subjectivity, chronotopic dynamism, and plot in the Galatea.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]