Cervantes and the Comic Mind of his Age [Hardcover]

This book relates Cervantes's poetics of comic fiction to the common framework of assumptions, values, and ideas held by Spaniards of the Golden Age about the comic and the kinds of writing which expressed it. This collective mentality underwent significant evolution in the period 1500 to 1630, and the factors which caused it are reflected in the ways in which the major comic genres--satire, the picaresque, thecomedia, the novella--are re-launched, transformed, and theoretically rationalized around 1600, the moment whenDon Quijoteand Cervantes's most famousnovelaswere written. Though Cervantes is universally acknowledged to be a master of comic fiction, his poetics have never before been considered from that specific angle, nor in such ample scope. In particular, the book sets itself to identify the differences between that poetics and the conceptions of comic fiction of his contemporaries, including Mateo Alem?n.

Abbreviations.
Introduction
I: Cervantess Poetics of Comic Fiction
Basic Values of Comedy and Satire
The Prologue toDon Quijote R Part I and its Implications
The Truth of History, I: Relevance and Rhetorical Pitch
The Truth of History, II: Making Present
II: Cervantes and the comic mind of the Spanish Golden Age
Evolution of Spanish Attitudes to comedy, 1500-1600
Socio-genesis, ideology, and culture
The New Comic Ethos: Social and Aesthetic Premises
Cervantes betweenGuzm?n de Alfaracheand its Heritage
Bibliography
Index

Extremely scholarly and deeply considered.... Cervantes's poetics of comedy are formed in the cross-currents [of the picaresque, the comedia, and the novella]....Few have charted these currents as knowledgeably and as subtly as Anthony Close does in this book. --Times Literary Supplement