Any student of Cervantes' literary production must at some point take into account the theories that inspired the plan and creation of Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda for, of all Cervantes' works, it is the one most directly related to the author's awareness of literary theory. This volume, in attempting to clarify the Persiles, traces the major influences reflected in the Renaissance literary theories which inspired it, examines Cervantes' ambivalent attitude toward those theories as revealed in his works, and provides a close examination of the structure of the Persiles. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Multidimensional characters, contrasting perspectives and ironic manipulations produce a kind of 'generic hybridisation' which exposes the fallacies of this type of romance fiction."--Jacket.

Even more popular in their day than Don Quixote, Cervantes's Exemplary Stories (1613) surprise, challenge and delight. Ranging from the picaresque to the satirical, Cervantes's Exemplary Stories defy the conventions of heroic chivalric literature through a combination of comic irony, moral ambiguity, realism, and sheer mirth. With acute narrative skill and deft characterisation, drawing on colloquial language and farce, Cervantes creates a tension between the everyday and the literary, the plausible and the improbable. While encouraging us to reach our own moral conclusions, he also persuades us to accept the coincidental and the incredible: two boys indulge their life of crime at a time of public prayer; a young nobleman undergoes a change of identity at the behest of not a princess but a mere gipsy girl, and, most fantastically, talking dogs philosophize in a ward full of syphilitics. By placing the extraordinary within the contexts of the ordinary, the Exemplary Stories chart new novelistic territory and demonstrate Cervantes at his most imaginative and innovative. This new translation captures the full vigour of Cervantes's wit and makes available two rarely printed tales, `The Illustrious Kitchen Maid' and `The Power of Blood'.

Alban Forcione analyzes the problem which has most troubled modern readers of the Persiles, its episodic character and confusing proliferation of action. Examining closely the structure of the romance Cervantes considered his masterpiece and boldest contribution to literature, Mr. Forcione discerns in it a simple pattern: a coherent cycle of catastrophe and restoration linked symbolically to the Christian vision of man's fall and redemption. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This study sets out to help restore Persiles to pride of place within Cervantes's corpus by reading it as the author's summa, as a boldly new kind of prose epic that casts an original light on the major political, religious, social, and literary debates of its era.

This examination of the last two tales of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares reveals the Christian Humanist tradition implicit in the most elusive works of the collection. In his study of El casamiento enganoso and El coloquio de los perros Alban Forcione demonstrates that Cervantes retained in their ostensible pessimism the themes of Erasmus' vision of the renovation of Christianity. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.