Tobias Smollett's theoretical considerations on the novel appear throughout his literary career,
e. g.
in his prologue to Roderick Random or in the prologues to his translations of Gil Blas and Don Quixote. Smollett drew from the great models of the Spanish and French picaresque traditions as well as from Don Quixote —the influence of which is particularly evident in Sir Laucelot Greaves. This essay explores the chief quixotic element in Smollett's best-known novel, Humphry Clinker: its hybrid quality, i.e. the composition of the ideal novel as a composite of the previous and contemporary novelistic trends. Humphry Clinker is therefore a literary compendium of eighteenth-century novelistic schools —like Don Quixote was of the fifteenth-century Spanish novel.
The episode in which Maritornes and the innkeeper's daughter attract Don Quixote to a hole in the wall where they hang him from his hand is a parody of the dismemberment of the female body in the Petrarchan tradition. The parody is achieved through a comical feminization of Don Quixote's body through a role reversal and through a cruel actualization of the dissective elements implied in the rhetoric of poetic bodily dismemberment. Don Quixote hanging from his hand is similar to corpses hanging by their hands for dissection, an image common in the anatomical books and in the anatomical theaters so popular in this period. The humor and horror of this scene reflect the anxiety —the combination of curiosity and fear— that dissected bodies arouse in a period when the anatomical science was dismembering the human body, the cornerstone around which human individuality was being constructed.
Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda es una novela de caballerías de otra índole. De hecho, es una obra de alto contenido político, cuyo héroe no ciñe espada. A lo largo de la acción, es la persuasión y no la coerción el arma que usa Persiles, elocuente y prudente orador, para proteger al grupo de peregrinos al que acompaña durante su largo y tortuoso viaje a Roma. Este estudio señala también la eficacia de este modus operandi de Persiles, y cómo la alternativa, la coerción violenta, tiene consecuencias nefastas. Mi conclusión es que, con Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Cervantes propone un nuevo paradigma de lo heroico.
El ensayo «Viaje con Don Quijote» describe las experiencias de Thomas Mann a bordo del vapor que le llevaba a los Estados Unidos. Durante el viaje leía la obra de Cervantes. Con la figura de Ricote como punto de partida, medita el exilio. El ensayo es una crítica del fascismo, filosofía contraria a los principios morales del europeo verdadero.
As an instrument of religious devotion, the rosary acquired renewed importance through its papally decreed association with the battle of Lepanto. The victory over the Turks on that occasion was perceived by Cervantes as the most important event of all times. And yet in Don Quijote, Cervantes presents the rosary bathed in satire, which in one instance went beyond the limits of endurance of the Portuguese Inquisition. In this article I study the seven appearances of the rosary in Don Quijote by placing each in its textual context. I then widen the focus by considering recent critical approaches within Bakhtinian and anthropological parameters. I conclude that the treatment of the rosary in Don Quijote may offer us a clue to the conflict between the new religiosity then being imposed by post-Tridentine Catholicism, and the popular manifestations of devotion prevalent at the time.