The Sanctification of Don Quixote
The Sanctification of Don Quixote

Author: Eric Ziolkowski

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2008-01-18

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0271033657

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Ziolkowski explores the religious implications of the figure of Don Quixote in Western literature from Cervantes to the present.While scholars and critics in the past have often called attention to the secularizing tendency of modern literature, to the numerous fictional adaptations of the Christ figure on the one hand, and the innumerable literary descendants of Don Quixote on the other, this study is the first to examine a lineage of characters in whom the images of the alleged savior and the mad knight are combined.After considering Don Quixote as the first modern novel, and taking into account its relationship to religion, society, and censorship in seventeenth-century Spain, Ziolkowski traces the history and fate of Don Quixote, the character, through a series of religious transformations over the centuries, focusing on three novels that adapt the Quixote figure: Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote. Ziolkowski argues that, given the increased secularization and decline of religious consciousness over the last several centuries, any pursuit of religious values or ideas becomes questionable and this appears &"quixotic&" insofar as it stands in contradiction to the sociohistorical context. He concludes that religious existence, for the few who pursue it in suffering, which means that the religious person feels temporally displaced for adhering to a seemingly obsolete faith and lifestyle.

Don Quixote’s Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature
Don Quixote’s Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature

Author: William Franke

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-31

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1040089348

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This book offers a reading particularly of Part II of Don Quixote, a reading that is embedded in a philosophical reflection on the revelation of religious truth in and through literature. Part II of Don Quixote is the far richer part for its meta-literary reflection on the novel itself as a genre and on life as such seen through the lens of self-reflection. The author has treated the phenomenon of modern self-reflexivity as originally theological in nature in previous publications (notably Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection, Routledge, 2021). The present endeavor expands this overall intellectual project, extending it into detailed consideration of what is recognizably another nodal great work inaugurating unprecedented forms of self-reflection in the early modern period. Reading the founding texts of literary and cultural tradition in this negative-theological key proves crucial to allowing them to release the full force of their religious vision in the present age, despite its sometimes obstinate secularity. This reading absorbs and reconciles the religious and secular readings of Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, two of Spain’s outstanding philosophical luminaries. Both thinkers based their entire philosophies and their analyses of the Spanish national character and destiny on their interpretations of the Quixote. Negative theology deploys critical reason that critiques the limits of reason itself and opens toward an unfathomable (un)ground of All. Such speculative interpretation performs a synthesis of the secularizing and sacralizing tendencies that are both sublimely operative in the text of the Quixote. It thereby enables the work to emerge in the fully parodic and paradoxical vitality that other interpretations, governed by one paradigm or the other, access only partially. Rather than falling into one camp or the other, the proposed approach combines and resources both heritages, sacred and secular, in their deepest synergisms. Spanish baroque mysticism and contemporary post-secular thought are made to converge in highlighting the blessed, even sacred, donation that literature like Don Quixote preserves and transmits as our most precious and saving cultural heritage.

Don Quixote and Catholicism
Don Quixote and Catholicism

Author: Michael McGrath

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2020-08-15

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1557539014

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Four hundred years since its publication, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote continues to inspire and to challenge its readers. The universal and timeless appeal of the novel, however, has distanced its hero from its author and its author from his own life and the time in which he lived. The discussion of the novel’s Catholic identity, therefore, is based on a reading that returns Cervantes’s hero to Cervantes’s text and Cervantes to the events that most shaped his life. The authors and texts McGrath cites, as well as his arguments and interpretations, are mediated by his religious sensibility. Consequently, he proposes that his study represents one way of interpreting Don Quixote and acts as a complement to other approaches. It is McGrath’s assertion that the religiosity and spirituality of Cervantes’s masterpiece illustrate that Don Quixote is inseparable from the teachings of Catholic orthodoxy. Furthermore, he argues that Cervantes’s spirituality is as diverse as early modern Catholicism. McGrath does not believe that the novel is primarily a religious or even a serious text, and he considers his arguments through the lens of Cervantine irony, satire, and multiperspectivism. As a Roman Catholic who is a Hispanist, McGrath proposes to reclaim Cervantes’s Catholicity from the interpretive tradition that ascribes a predominantly Erasmian reading of the novel. When the totality of biographical and sociohistorical events and influences that shaped Cervantes’s religiosity are considered, the result is a new appreciation of the novel’s moral didactic and spiritual orientation.

Cervantes' Don Quixote
Cervantes' Don Quixote

Author: Howard Mancing

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2006-04-30

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0313081956

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Recently voted the best literary work of all time, Cervantes' Don Quixote is widely read by students and has had enormous influence on popular culture. Written by a leading Cervantes scholar yet accessible to students and general readers, this book conveniently introduces Cervantes' masterpiece. Included along with a detailed plot summary are chapters on the novel's background, themes, style, and reception. The volume closes with an extensive bibliographical essay and a selected, general bibliography. In 2002, the Norwegian Book Club, affiliated with the Nobel Prize organization, polled 100 writers from around the world, asking each to name the 10 best works of imaginative literature of all time. Cervantes' Don Quixote, though first published in 1605, was the overwhelming winner. Don Quixote is a favorite among students and general readers alike. It has been translated into more languages than any book other than the bible; adapted to the stage more than any other non-dramatic text; illustrated more than any other novel; and inspired more films than any other literary work. Written by a leading scholar yet accessible to high school students, this guide is an indispensable introduction to the world's most important novel. An introductory chapter overviews Cervantes' life and career and discusses the background of his novel. The book then provides a detailed plot summary of Don Quixote and considers the merits of different editions. It then looks at the cultural and historical contexts surrounding the novel and gives extensive attention to the work's themes, style, and reception. A bibliographical essay and selected, general bibliography of major studies conclude the volume.

The Literary Kierkegaard
The Literary Kierkegaard

Author: Eric Ziolkowski

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2011-12-31

Total Pages: 446

ISBN-13: 0810127822

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"Eric Ziolkowski's monumental study examines Kierkegaard's whole "prolix literature" - including the pseudonymous and the signed published writings as well as his private journals, papers, and letters - in relation to works by five other literary giants. Kierkegaard himself stresses the essentially literary as opposed to the strictly theological or philosophical nature of his writings. Uncovering this neglected aspect of Kierkegaard's oeuvre, Ziolkowski first considers the notions of aesthetics and the aesthetic as Kierkegaard adapted them, then his posture as a poet and his self-conception as "a weed in literature". After taking account of the history of the critical recognition of Kierkegaard as a literary artist, Ziolkowski looks at an important characteristic of Kierkegaard's literary craft that has received relatively little attention: the manner by which he and his pseudonyms read and quoted other authors. Ziolkowski explores the connections between the philosopher's writings and those of other literary masters who directly influenced him, such as Aristophanes, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and those such as Wolfram von Eschenbach and Carlyle, who, while not direct influences, gave paradigmatic expression to some of the same aspects of aesthetic, ethical, and religious existence that Kierkegaard portrayed. A necessary resource for Kierkegaard scholars, philosophers, and students of religion and literature alike, 'The literary Kierkegaard' corrects a significant lack in our understanding of one of the most significant thinkers of the modern era." -- dust jacket.

Inventing the Romantic Don Quixote in France
Inventing the Romantic Don Quixote in France

Author: Clark Colahan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-22

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1000864278

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Cervantes’ now mythical character of Don Quixote began as a far different figure than the altruistic righter of wrongs we know today. The transformation from mad highway robber to secular saint took place in the Romantic Era, but how and where it began has just begun to be understood. Germany and England played major roles, but, contrary to earlier literary historians, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau and the Jansenists scooped Henry and Sarah Fielding. Jansenism, a persecuted puritanical and intellectual movement linked to Pascal, identified itself with Don Quixote’s virtues, excused his vices, and wrote a game-changing sequel mediated by the transformative powers of a sorcerer from Commedia dell’Arte. As an early Romantic, Rousseau was attracted to the hero’s fertile imagination and tender love for Dulcinea, foregrounding the would-be knight’s quest in a play and his best-selling novel, Julie. Sarah Fielding reacted similarly, basing her utopian novel David Simple on the Jansenist concept of quixotic trust in others. Colahan here reproduces and explains for the first time the extremely rare original illustrations of the French sequel to Cervantes’ novel, and documents the fortunes in French culture of the magician at the heart of the Romantic Quixote.

Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England
Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England

Author: Dale B. J. Randall

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-01-29

Total Pages: 763

ISBN-13: 0191561584

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Cervantes in Seventeenth-century England garners well over a thousand English references to Cervantes and his works, thus providing the fullest and most intriguing early English picture ever made of the writings of Spain's greatest writer. Besides references to the nineteen books of Cervantes's prose available to seventeenth-century English readers (including four little-known abridgments), this new volume includes entries by such notable writers as Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, Thomas Hobbes, John Dryden, and John Locke, as well as many lesser-known and anonymous writers. A reader will find, among others, a counterfeiter, a midwife, an astrologer, a princess, a diarist, and a Harvard graduate. Altogether this broad range of writers, famed and forgotten alike, brings to light not only sectarian and political tensions of the day, but also glimpses of the arts-of weaving, singing, acting, engraving, and painting. Even dancing, for there was a dance called the "Sancho Panzo". The volume opens with a wide-ranging Introduction that among other things traces the English reception of both Cervantes's Don Quixote and his Novelas ejemplares, including the part they played in English drama. In the main body of the work, individual items are arranged chronologically by year and, within that framework, alphabetically by author, thus providing little-known seventeenth-century evidence regarding the nature and breadth of British interest in Cervantes in various decades. Thorough annotation helps readers to place individual entries in their historical, social, political, and in some instances religious contexts. The volume includes twenty-nine germane seventeenth-century pictures, an index of references to chapters in Don Quixote, and a full bibliography and index.

Cervantes
Cervantes

Author: Dominick L. Finello

Publisher: Tamesis

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9781855660533

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Cervantes' work closely analysed for evidence of his attitude to academic life and to conversos, and his responses to technical challenges. A number of longstanding polemical issues related to Cervantes' life and creativity are closely examined here, throwing new light on his work as a whole. The book begins by exploring Cervantes' complex and ambivalent attitude towards academic life, which yielded comic portraits of students and many parodies of the academic tendencies of false praise, pedantry and pompousness. It goes on to consider the impact of the converso, or New Christian, on Spanish collective thinking, and Cervantes and Lope de Vega in particular; Old Christian versus New Christian rhetoric frequently determines the expression of such characters as Sancho Panza. An analysis of Cervantes' controversialinterpolation of stories in the first part of Don Quijote follows, and Professor Finello concludes by looking at the enigmatic discourse and dialogue of Don Quijote himself, elegant and harmonious despite the knight's apparent madness, arguing that since Quijote believes he is justified in imposing his chivalric values upon those who come into contact with him, he adjusts the situations in which he finds himself to the appropriate rhetoric of literary tradition. DOMINICK FINELLO is Professor of Spanish at Rider University.

The Practice of Quixotism
The Practice of Quixotism

Author: S. Gordon

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-11-13

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0230601537

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Using postmodern theory, The Practice of Quixotism explores eighteenth-century women's texts that use quixote narratives, which typically demand that individuals purge their minds of internalized fictions to insist instead that the reality we encounter is inevitably mediated by the texts we have read.