Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Birth of the Sequel: The Celestina's Maculate Conception
- 2 From Knights Errant to Errant Women: The Sequels of Feliciano de Silva
- 3 A Cannon Shot from the Margins: The Segundo Lazarillo's Unexamined Role in the Story of the Sequel and the Picaresque
- 4 The Author Strikes Back: Alemán's Picaresque Revenge
- 5 From the Galatea to the Quijote: Cervantes' Quest for Closure
- Select Bibliography
- Index
5 - From the Galatea to the Quijote: Cervantes' Quest for Closure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 The Birth of the Sequel: The Celestina's Maculate Conception
- 2 From Knights Errant to Errant Women: The Sequels of Feliciano de Silva
- 3 A Cannon Shot from the Margins: The Segundo Lazarillo's Unexamined Role in the Story of the Sequel and the Picaresque
- 4 The Author Strikes Back: Alemán's Picaresque Revenge
- 5 From the Galatea to the Quijote: Cervantes' Quest for Closure
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Literary continuation is a little considered and even less understood element of Don Quijote. This is all the more unfortunate because the sequel plays a central role in the creation of Don Quijote and Don Quijote in the creation of the sequel. The same holds for Don Quijote's elected precursors and the genres they founded, namely the chivalric, pastoral, Celestinesque and picaresque novels. This chapter proposes a new lens for reading Don Quijote and its antecedents: a focus on the form and function of the sequel and the means and motivation of the sequelist. Indirectly, it suggests a way of tracing the history of the early modern Spanish novel through the prism of literary continuation.
Continuation imbues every page of Part I of Don Quijote. It is present in the front matter, where Cervantes meditates on the challenges of continuing his own stalled career two decades after La Galatea's failure to yield a second part; in the early discussion of Don Quijote's favorite writer, the era's great sequelist Feliciano de Silva; in the Scrutiny of Books episode, where every work considered either is a sequel or generates sequels; and in the very structure of the work, which alludes to various continuation traditions through its division into parts – “partes.”
Among the continuations that Cervantes reads most productively in Part I are the rival La Diana sequels of Alonso Pérez and Gaspar Gil Polo, his own La Galatea and the genre-generating Amadís de Gaula and La Celestina sequels of Feliciano de Silva.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Invention of the SequelExpanding Prose Fiction in Early Modern Spain, pp. 178 - 222Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011