Cervantes and His Women Readers

Abstract

Desocupado lector, sin juramento me podrás creer que quisiera que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse.(Prologue, Don Quijote de la Mancha, pt. 1) hen Cervantes wrote part one of Don Quijote as an epistle to the reader, he began a conversation with his reading public that would inform and define modern literature. His iconoclastic prologue crystallizes the triangular relationship among authors, texts, and readers. Whether as an idle or gentle reader, a listener, or even a teller of quixotic tales, the consumer of fiction is positioned as key to the novel's life and legacy. Ten years later, Cervantes solidified novelists' reliance on readers by inscribing readership into the structure, form, and plot of part two, in which nearly everyone-from authors to translators, galley slaves to aristocrats-is intimately involved in reading, writing, narrating, and acting out the story of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza. This lively dialogue between texts and consumers defined the novel as a self-conscious interplay between literature and life.Undoing the conventions of literature, Cervantes exposes the pedantry and artifice of the pastoral, chivalric, byzantine, and epic genres so popular in his day. He drew on all of those genres to produce a new entity that spoke directly to readers and their world. In that enterprise, he cast a wide net, depicting the lives of rich and poor, Christians and non-Christians, well-known literary characters and real people. By providing an overview of the tumultuous society in which he lived and wrote, Cervantes inscribed the conflicts of the modern nation-state as well as the challenges facing everyday people into what many 312 W

Cervantes’s interpolated novels in “The comical history of Don Quixote”

“…Another change recorded by Vollendorf (2005) is an unprecedented rise in female literacy that began to occur in Spain around 1580. Not only did women become readers, but, more importantly, writers of all literary genres.…”