Transnational Cervantes

by William Childers

Overview

This ambitious work aims to utterly change the way Don Quixote and Cervantes' other works are read, particularly the posthumous The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda. William Childers sets out to free Cervantes' work from its context within the histories of the European national literatures. Instead, he examines early modern Spanish cultural production as an antecedent to contemporary postcolonial literature, especially Latin American fiction of the past half century.

In order to construct his new context for reading Cervantes, Childers proceeds in three distinct phases. First, Cervantes' relation to the Western literary canon is reconfigured, detaching him from the realist novel and associating him, instead, with magic realism. Second, Childers provides an innovative reading of The Trial of Persiles and Sigismunda as a transnational romance, exploring cultural boundaries and the hybridization of identities. Finally, Childers explores traces of and similarities to Cervantes in contemporary fiction.

Theoretically eclectic and methodologically innovative, Transnational Cervantes opens up many avenues for research and debate, aiming to bring Cervantes' writings forward into the brave new world of our postcolonial age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442621633
Publisher:	University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Publication date:	05/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	334
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

William Childers is an associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College.

Table of Contents

Preface: Transnationalizing Cervantes

Acknowledgments

Part One. Decolonizing Cervantes

1. Introduction: The Colonized Imagination
   1. Internal Colonialism in Early Modern Spain
   2. ‘Under my cloak, I kill the king’: Reading and Resistance
   3. La Mancha as Borderland
2. Cervantes and lo real maravilloso
   1. Carpentier, Forcione, and the ‘Persiles’
   2. The Marvellous as a Contested Site in European Culture
   3. Ontological Ambiguity and Generic Hybridity in Cervantes
   4. Cide Hamete Benengeli: The Other Within
   5. Conclusion

Part Two. Cervantes’ Transnational Romance

1. Pilgrimage and Social Change in Persiles y Sigismunda
   1. Feliciana de la Voz: A Secularized Miracle Story
   2. ‘Según es cristiana la gente’: Antonio de Villaseñor’sReturn toQuintanar de la Orden
   3. Conclusion: The Reader as Pilgrim
2. Turning Spain Inside Out
   1. Mapping the Fictional Realms of Persiles y Sigismunda
   2. Transitions: Toward a Poetics of Social Restructuring
   3. A Nation Traversed by Its Borders

Part Three. Cervantes Now

1. Remembering the Future: Cervantes and the New Moroccan Immigration to Spain
   1. The New Hispano-Muslims
   2. Splicing the Broken Thread
   3. An Internal Colony in Sixteenth-Century Spain
   4. Cervantes’ Moriscas: Yesterday and Tomorrow
2. Chicanoizing Don Quixote
   1. ‘Launch against the Windmills!’
   2. Three Readers Rewriting
   3. From the Morsico Jofor to the Ghost Dance Cult
   4. Don Quixote, the Novel, and the Postcolonial World

1. Conclusion: Cervantes and Shakespeare: Toward a Canon of Spanglish Literature
   1. Colonial Quixotes
   2. Shakespeare, Race, and the Spanish Inquisition
   3. Toward an Americanist Reading of Persiles y Sigismunda

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Editorial Reviews

Transnational Cervantes is a sophisticated and beautifully written book ... In my judgment, this is not only one of the best books on Cervantes by a young scholar, but one of the best books on Cervantes.

Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America - Edward H. Friedman

Childers’s excellent book provides us with ample evidence of how the divisions informing our chosen fields color the way we read the canons that compose them.

Revista Hispanica Moderna - William Egginton

[Transnational Cervantes] is the product of original thinking and outstanding historical research. This is a most welcome contribution to the field of early modern studies, the kind of scholarly work that will stir healthy debate inside the discipline(s) of Hispanism and beyond.

Hispanic Review - David R. Castillo

For those of us who write on Cervantes with our focus on the entire planet and our concerns in the only realm of reality that matters – the now, the us – this is a welcome book, a necessary book.

Renaissance Quarterly - Julio Baena