Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World [Hardcover]

Two sets of related issues prompt this study: the birth of the New World in European consciousness and the rise of the Cervantine novel in Spain. The first full-length study to move beyond an inventory of Cervantes's references to the Indies--to Mexico and Peru, cannibals and tobacco, parrots and alligators--this book interprets his novels as a transatlantic, cross-cultural, and multi-linguistic achievement.

Introduction,Novel Genres, Novel Worlds
1. The Americanist Cervantes
2. The Novel about the Novel
3. The Novel as 'Moletta': Cervantes and Defoe
4. Some Versions of Hybridity:cacaoandPotos?
5. 'Scorpion Oil': The Books of Chivalry
6. Islands in the Mind: Utopography
7. Jewels in the Crown: The Colonial War Epic
8. Remembrance of Things Lost: Ethnohistory
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Deftly written and unfailingly thought-provoking. --Times Literary Supplement

In a perceptive and ingenious turn, Wilson addresses the question of origins through what she terms 'the multiple rises of the novel.' Motivated by Ian Watt but moving in unique directions, she readsDon QuixoteagainstRobinson Crusoe.... Wilson offers transatlantic encounters of the greatest magnitude. Exceedingly rich, sophisticated, and knowing, her analyses exemplify the very hybridity that she praises as 'inescapable' in Cervantes' literary trajectory. --Choice

Her study is impressively far-reaching --Modern Language Quarterly

Diana de Armas Wilson is Professor of English and Renaissance Studies, University of Denver