"Many critics regard Cervantes's Don Quixote as the most influential literary book on British literature. Indeed the impact on British authors was immense, as can be seen from 17th-century plays by Fletcher, Massinger and Beaumont, through the great 18th-century novels of Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Lennox, and on into more modern and contemporary novelists. 20th-century critics, fascinated by Cervantes, were moved to write what we now see as the classical works of Cervantes scholarship. Through their previous publications, the eminent contributors to this volume have helped to determine the reception of Cervantes in Britain. Together they now offer a comprehensive and innovative picture of this topic, discussing the English translations of Cervantes's works, the literary genres which developed under his shadow, and the best-known authors who consciously emulated him. Cervantes's influence upon British literature emerges as decidedly the deepest of any writer outside of English and, very possibly, of any writer since the Renaissance."

This study examines a series of recurring patterns that can be observed in Miguel de Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares (1613). Author E. T. Aylward proposes that the precise ordering of Cervantes's twelve novellas is based on the thematic and structural patterns of the individual stories contained in the collection.

This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading Cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. An extensive general Introduction places the Novelas in the context of Cervantes's life and work; provides basic information about their content, composition, internal ordering, publication, and critical reception, gives detailed consideration to the contemporary literary-theoretical issues implicit in the title, and outlines and contributes to the key critical debates on their variety, unity, exemplarity, and supposed 'hidden mystery'. After a series of chapters on the individual stories, the volume concludes with two survey essays devoted, respectively, to the understanding of eutrapelia implicit in the Novelas, andto the dynamics of the character pairing that is one of their salient features. Detailed plot summaries of each of the stories, and a Guide to Further Reading are supplied as appendices. Stephen Boyd is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies of University College Cork.