Don Quixjote de la Mancha
Place on List:
II. Literary Genre: The
Novel
4. How
do elements of irony work in the novel?
Miguel
de Cervantes Saavedra. *Don
Quixjote de la Mancha.
(1605,
Spain)
Key Terms (tags): Spanish, Spain,
irony, novel
Supporting References:
- Website devoted: http://www.donquixote.com/5.html
- Online course: http://oyc.yale.edu/spanish-and-portuguese/span-300
- Birch, Dinah. "Don Quixote de la Mancha." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013
“Don Quixote de la Mancha. A comic romance by Miguel
de *Cervantes, dated 1605 (although probably
published 1604), a second part appearing in 1615. Cervantes initially
gave his work the form of a burlesque of the ballads and romances of
chivalry (see Amadis
of Gaul; Palmerin
of England), which were already beginning to
lose their popularity. But he soon ceased to write mere burlesque, as
the character of his hero developed and deepened, and his work
acquired the richness and profundity that have made it one of the
most popular classics ever written. Don Quixote, a poor gentleman of
La Mancha, a man of gentle and amiable disposition and otherwise
sane, has had his wits disordered by inordinate devotion to the tales
of chivalry, and imagines himself called upon to roam the world in
search of adventures on his old nag Rocinante, and clad in rusty
armour, accompanied by a squire in the shape of the rustic Sancho
Panza, a curious mixture of shrewdness and credulity, whom he lures
with the prospect of the governorship of the island of Barataria.
Quixote seeks to conform to chivalric tradition by electing a
beautiful damsel, one who in fact is a strapping peasant girl from a
neighbouring village, to be the mistress of his heart. To him she is
known as Dulcinea del Toboso, an honour of which she is entirely
unaware. To the disordered imagination of the knight the most
commonplace objects assume fearful or romantic forms, and he is
consequently involved in absurd adventures, as in the famous episode
(I. 8) when he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants.
Finally one of his friends, Sansón Carrasco, in order to force him
to return home, disguises himself as a knight, defeats Don Quixote in
armed combat, and requires him to abstain for a year from chivalrous
exploits. This period Don Quixote resolves to spend as a shepherd,
living a pastoral life, but, falling sick on his return to his
village, after a few days he dies. The plot also contains several
lengthy digressions, including the ‘Tale
of *Inappropriate Curiosity’ and the story of
Cardenio and Lucinda. After the appearance of the first part of Don
Quixote, a continuation was issued by a writer who styled
himself Alonso
*Fernández de Avellaneda, a forgery with which
Cervantes ironically engages in his own second part. The book was
translated into English by Thomas Shelton (fl. 1598–1629) in 1612
and 1620, by John Phillips (1631–1706?), nephew of John
*Milton, in 1687, and in the 18th century by at
least Peter
*Motteux and Tobias
*Smollett. John Rutherford's Penguin Classic
version appeared in 2000. Don Quixote supplied the plots of
several 17th‐century English plays, and inspired and continues to
inspire innumerable imitations (see Lennox,
Charlotte, for an example). Its
underlying theme, the confrontation of illusion with reality,
prefigures a topic that has been a staple of later fiction; its comic
irony, multiple perspectives, and metafictional elements (e.g. its
use of parody, its series of unreliable narrators, its characters'
awareness of themselves as literary figures, and its general literary
playfulness) have proved seminal. See P. E. Russell, Cervantes
(1985); introduction to Rutherford's translation.”
- Birch, Dinah. "Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Cervantes and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Cervantes
Saavedra, Miguel de (1547–1616) The great Spanish novelist and
dramatist, born in Alcalá de Henares of an ancient but impoverished
family, and wounded, losing for life the use of his left hand, at the
battle of Lepanto (1571). He was taken by pirates in 1575, and spent
the next five years as a prisoner at Algiers. The remainder of his
life was, for the greater part, occupied with a struggle to earn a
livelihood from literature and humble government employment. He was
an agent responsible for provisioning the Armada against England and
was twice imprisoned in Spain. His first attempt at fiction was a
pastoral romance, La Galatea (1585), which was followed by
his masterpiece, Don
Quixote, of which the first part was dated 1605
(although probably published in 1604), the second 1615. He also wrote
a number of plays (sixteen of which survive), a collection of highly
accomplished short stories, Novelas ejemplares (1613:
Exemplary Stories), and a tale of adventure, Persiles y
Sigismunda, published posthumously in 1617. John
*Fletcher drew largely on these last two for
the plots of his plays. See P. E. Russell, Cervantes (1985).”
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