Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) wrote largely during the latter part of his life. After the appearance of his pastoral prose fiction,La Galatea(1585), and a brief engagement as a practicing playwright at the end of the sixteenth century, he is heard from again officially in 1605 whenDon Quijote Iis published in Madrid. All of his other works appear in print between 1613 and 1617:Novelas ejemplares(1613);Viaje del Parnaso(1614);Don Quijote II(1615);Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses(1615); andLos trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda(1617).

Since most of Cervantes’s known works were...

In his autobiography Robbe-Grillet, the chief exponent of thenouveau roman,made a surprising and, apparently, provocative declaration: “I have never spoken of anything but myself.” The sentence points to a fundamental problem that has traversed contemporary theoretical discussions, namely, who speaks in a text, what a text speaks of, and from where it speaks. On the one hand, we know that the limits of our language are the limits of our world, that is, that we canthinkour relation with the real only in terms of discourse. On the other hand, when one speaks, it is impossible to...

In 1615, a volume appeared in Madrid entitled “Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca representados. . . . Los títulos destas ocho comedias, y sus entremeses van en la cuarta hoja” (“Eight comedies and eightentremesesnever represented. . . . The titles of these eight comedies and theirentremesesappear on the fourth page”). The volume’s title is significant in that it returns to one of Cervantes’s reflections inAdjunta al Parnaso(1614), where he indicates, perhaps ironically, that he had composed six comedies withtheirnewentremeses(interludes) which he intended to print “so that one may examine...

It has been said that languages have no meaning, and that it is people who make them signify. This assertion by the Italian linguist Tullio de Mauro (1970) has two essential implications: (a) that what is signified and its discursive anchors (metaphor, symbol, allegory, and so on) exist not a priori, but as a result of an operation. In this sense, the notion of referent does not refer as much to what is real but to reality that, in turn, refers not to a fact but to the system of values of an interpretation; (b) as a corollary of the...

The history of the novella in romance literature has been defined by Walter Pabst (1972) as the history of an antinomy, one that brings about a confrontation between the necessity of obeying the strict rules of classical rhetoric and a writer’s explicit will to break them. Theory and practice would not, therefore, be two sides of the same coin, but divergent elements whose fusion’s only role would be to enmask, through a totally orthodox, theoretical cloak, a narrative practice that was generally alien to the dictates of the norm. For Pabst, that divergence was usually resolved through irony. His thesis...

Throughout the pages of this book, we have argued that Cervantes’s writing should be viewed not only as an original proposal but also, and fundamentally, as the result of a complex dialogue with the discourses of his own time. In this sense, his interest in writing may be seen as going beyond the production of individual works, to encompass a rethinking and a reshaping of the manner in which those works had to be dealt with. In a way, one could characterize Cervantes’s universe as metadiscursive, despite the fact that, until very recently, such a characterization has eluded a large...