Cervantes’s masterpiece Don Quixote has been variously interpreted as a parody of chivalric romances, an epic of heroic idealism, a commentary on the author’s alienation, and a critique of Spanish imperialism. While the Romantic tradition downplayed the novel’s hilarity by transforming Don Quixote into a tragic hero, readers who view it as a parody accept at face value Cervantes’s intention to denounce the popular yet outdated romances of his time. Don Quixote certainly pokes fun at the adventures of literary knights-errant, but its plot also addresses the historical realities of 17th-century Spain. Although no proof has been found, it is likely that Cervantes was a converso (of Jewish descent), given his father’s ties to the medical profession, the family’s peripatetic existence, and the government’s denial of his two requests for posts in the Indies. However, the author’s nuanced irony, his humanistic outlook, and his comic genius contrast notably with the melancholy, didactic tone attributed to many other Spanish converso writers.

Cervantes’s strikingly modern narrative instead gives voice to a dazzling assortment of characters with diverse beliefs and perspectives. His inclusion of many differing opinions constitutes a provision called heteroglossia (“multiple voices”) by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who deemed it essential to the development of the modern novel. Don Quixote’s comic edge illustrates another of Bakhtin’s concepts, carnivalization, which favours the playfully positive aspects of the body over an ascetic rejection of the carnal. Sancho Panza’s rotund shape—his name means “holy belly”—offsets Don Quixote’s elongated, emaciated frame, and together they recall the medieval folkloric figures of an expansive, materialist Carnival and a lean, self-denying Lent. Yet, far from depicting illusion and reality as equal opposites, their relationship undergoes constant change: if Don Quixote assumes the lead in Part I, Sancho overtakes his master and secures his own independence in Part II.

The differences between Part I and Part II demonstrate Cervantes’s awareness of the power of the printed word. Don Quixote’s history began with his obsessive reading of chivalric romances; in Part II, he realizes that his adventures are eagerly read and discussed by others. The knight’s visit in Part II to a Barcelona printing shop, where he finds a spurious Part II in press and denounces it as injurious to the innocent reader and to his own rightful authorship (since he stands to lose royalties from its sales), underscores the cultural and economic impact of books of fiction. Despite his own books’ popularity, Cervantes earned little from their sales. Nonetheless, his innovative reworkings of literary forms—from the pastoral novel La Galatea and exemplary short stories to the acclaimed novel Don Quixote and his one serious attempt at romance, the posthumously published Persiles y Sigismunda—show just how well Cervantes understood not only the 17th-century marketplace but the social effect of literature.

Importance and influence

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Cervantes’s influence resonates in the popular term “quixotic” and the immediately recognizable forms of his two major protagonists, whose adventures reappear continually across the cultural landscape in theatre, film, opera, ballet, and even comic books. No study of the novel can ignore the author or his most famous work: the Hungarian theorist Gyorgy Lukács considers Don Quixote “the first great novel of world literature,” while the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes calls Cervantes the “founding father” of Latin American literature. The novel form, according to some late 20th-century critics, has no one origin but began to exist in different countries at different times and for different reasons. Nonetheless, Cervantes’s novel, with its innovations to Spanish literature, is outstanding in its creation of a new worldview. It is not coincidental that the writers most influenced by Cervantes—Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, to name only British novelists—initiated radical changes in their own literary traditions.

By illuminating the many differences in and surrounding his world, Cervantes placed in doubt the previous ways of portraying that world, whether those were literary or historical. Indeed, one of Don Quixote’s main tenets is that fiction and historical truth are frequently indistinguishable, as both are dependent on the reader’s perception. Cervantes’s approach is frequently dubbed “dualistic” since he often opted to express diverse modes of thought through the pairing of opposites, as with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the talking dogs of “Colloquy of the Dogs,” or the image of the baciyelmo (“basinhelmet,” as the narrator describes the bright object worn on a distant rider’s head). Representing the opposites of reality and illusion, baciyelmo is Sancho’s brass basin but Don Quixote’s gold helmet.

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The split depicted within Cervantes’s characters—Don Quixote’s “reasoned unreason” for example—has sometimes been attributed to the author’s intended contrast of reality and illusion (as well as of other opposites). The question of whether the self-proclaimed knight stands for an idealism never fully attainable or for a laughably meaningless madness continues to shadow interpretations of Don Quixote, as it has since its introduction by the German Romantics. Opposition between idealism and realism as a leading theme in Cervantes’s fiction, including the Exemplary Stories and his plays, remained influential as late as the mid-20th century.

Yet Cervantes was characteristically ambiguous on these issues, and this ambiguity inspired criticism of the later 20th century to reconsider previous judgments on his literary prominence. Translated almost immediately into English, French, and Italian, Don Quixote was viewed primarily as a comic work or a satire of Spanish customs. Ironically, it was the German Romantics, selectively reading Don Quixote as a tragic hero, who granted his author world standing. In contrast, 19th-century Spanish academics dismissed Cervantes’s accomplishments, even though his style and language set the standard for modern Castilian. Not until the 20th century did the acclaim of foreign critics and Spanish expatriates finally rehabilitate Cervantes in his own country.

When Freudian psychology became popular, it engendered critical interest in the psychological force of Cervantes’s fiction. European criticism was predisposed early on toward psychoanalytical approaches, which stressed the Spanish author’s duality and ambiguity. From the 1970s, French and American criticism viewed Cervantes as a fragmented character not unlike his protagonists. Both the author and his characters have been perceived as psychoanalytical cases, with Don Quixote’s madness attributed to his “middle-age crisis” and Cervantes’s treatment of several characters to his “subconscious sympathies.” As these critics worked to reveal unexpressed desires, they also analyzed the roles played by women. Feminist and gender studies have increasingly looked to Cervantes for his perceptive approach to portraying the women of 17th-century Spain. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Cervantes expressed great empathy toward women. Although he stops short of a “feminist” position, numerous female characters such as Marcela and Dorotea in Don Quixote and Isabela Castrucho in Persiles y Sigismunda speak forcefully in defense of women’s rights.

Similarly, criticism in the late 20th century began to focus on Cervantes’s preoccupations with contemporary economic and historical events. The 1609 expulsion of the Moriscos (converted Moors), the correct governance of Spain’s overseas colonies, and the exploitation of African slaves are often considered as covertly polemical topics for Don Quixote’s alert readers. The Exemplary Stories and plays have been plumbed for their engagement with political and economic factors. Documented in Don Quixote and Persiles y Sigismunda, Cervantes’s knowledge of and interest in the New World are central to his perception of a different world, one equally as cross-cultural and multilingual as that of the 21st century.