Cervantes: Don Quixote

Abstract

This chapter examines the foundational impact of Cervantes's Don Quixote on world literature. It begins with a brief outline of Cervantes's early life, traces his struggles to build a literary career following his five years of captivity in Algiers, and notes his phenomenal change in authorial fortune late in life with the publication of Don Quixote in 1605. The chapter then examines Cervantes's ground‐breaking novel as an early modern “bestseller” that has served for more than four centuries as a model for numerous literary, theatrical, and cinematic texts. Finally, it explores the ways in which Don Quixote 's interrelated modes of parody, idealism, and postmodernism (as both creative and interpretive frames) have tracked and informed not just the rise of the novel as a genre but also of modernity itself.