Novel Foundations

Novel Foundations: Architecture and Literary Modernity in Cervantes' Prose Works is an interdisciplinary study of the narrative functions of architecture in Miguel de Cervantes' late prose fictions: Don Quijote (1605 and 1615), the Exemplary Novels (1613), and The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617). Drawing upon Renaissance architectural theory and practice, it considers the implications of Cervantes' insistent references to real and imagined architectural spaces and elements of urban design in his works. It examines Cervantes' appropriation of early modern Italian and Spanish architectural discourses, as well as his evocation and transformation of classical analogies that linked built spaces to cognition, human nature, rhetoric, and religion.

By analysing Cervantes' descriptions of specific structures, landmarks, and architectural styles--as well as his representations of acts of building and architectural ruin--the book argues that Cervantes deploys architectural discourse to build novel literary worlds that bear upon issues of identity, reason, truth, perception, language, and the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. In so doing, Cervantes lays the foundations for some of the modern novel's most pressing concerns, including the individual as literary subject, the nature of literary creation, and the representation of a world whose presumed solidity begins to crumble in the face of new scientific and aesthetic frameworks.