Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares

This book offers a thematically oriented reading of the Novelas ejemplares with relevant asides to Cervantes’ other works. It takes into account the recent scholarship on the Novelas, and it also reflects the author’s experience of teaching Cervantes’ works in recent years.

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Cervantine Lessons offers a fresh approach to the Novelas ejemplares (1613) of Cervantes in which the twelve novelas are not analyzed individually nor on the basis of generic definitions but rather from a thematic perspective. In this way, certain pertinent themes and problems are explored by grouping the relevant novelas as they dramatize these problems, often leaving the reader with unresolved “conclusions,” and in other instances offering an affirmative solution. The issues examined include the ironies and injustices of social class, the problem of honra and justice, the complex hostilities and interactions of distinct cultures, and the problem of finding a seventeenth-century work of fiction relevant and stimulating to the twenty-first-century reader.