Peter N. Dunn

Don Juan Manuel: The World as Text

Or, the text as world: we could say it either way. Don Juan Manuel (1282-1348), grandson of the warrior king Saint Ferdinand, and nephew of Alfonso the Learned, spent most of his life at war against his fellow nobles and against other members of his own, royal, family. He entered his first battle at the age of twelve, and a few months later he heard king Sancho IV, his cousin, make confession as he died. He asked the king to bless him, which he said he could not do, because his father had never blessed him when he died; so he had no blessing to hand on. The next two kings succeeded to the throne at the age of nine years and one year, respectively. For a moment, during the minority of Alfonso XI, he was all powerful: regent of Castile, and allied by marriage to the throne of Aragon. Two years later, in 1325, isolated and humiliated by Alfonso, and with his daughter Constanza held hostage by the king, he went to the extreme of renouncing his oath of fealty, and took refuge with the Moorish king of Granada. This is not the place to narrate his extraordinary career, the assassinations and counter assassinations in which he was involved, and his brutal intimidation of his vassals so as to prevent them from supporting the king. I merely start from a rather simple observation: that he was embroiled in events that make the troubles that face his fictional nobleman, Count Lucanor, seem trivial by comparison. When he turned to writing, it is perhaps not surprising that his most successful and enduring work is the one in which a great magnate, the Count Lucanor, is beset by the problems that

Shaping Experience: Narrative Strategies in Cervantes

One of the most influential books to appear in our time on the history of the novel is The Rise of the Novel by Ian Watt.1 Watts book placed that rise in the land of Defoe and Fielding; consequently, since 1957 hispanists have been raising their voices, more in anger than in sorrow. More recently, historians of literature as well as novelists have increasingly come to agree with the protesters.2 So we hispanists can now look back with satisfaction, knowing that the abducted infant genre, the novel, has finally been restored to its rightful parent, like the heroines of La gitanilla and of La ilustre fregona. Our story has a happy ending, as all such stories should. Our champions have returned with the prize, and the prize is the bright, shining clich6 which says that Cervantes is the father of the modern novel. After so happy and so providential a conclusion, it would surely be unmannerly not to bask in the steady glow of that cliche. Even so, some scholars, have puzzled and debated over its authenticity: is Don Quixote really a novel? What should be the appropriate generic description, not only of Don Quixote, but of all the various prose works of Cervantes? Should they be classified as novel or as romance?

A Post-Modern Approach to the Spanish Renaissance: Paul Julian Smith on the Literature and Literary Theory of the Golden Age

In his Introduction, Dr Smith presents this book as ‘the first study of writing in the Spanish Renaissance or Golden Age to draw extensively on what has become known as “post-structuralism”‘.1 He does acknowledge some recent work in English, but his is the first attempt to approach, in a deconstructive mode, not a single piece of literature or an author, but a whole periods representative texts in three principal genres (lyric poetry, picaresque narrative, drama) as well as poetics. It merits attention, therefore, by virtue of being a trail-blazer. This is not conventional literary history, though the poets (Garcilaso, Herrera, Gongora) are treated sequentially, and the same may be said of the genres presented in the other chapters. Texts are not made part of a historical narrative or expressions of a mentalite. But neither is it totally detached from history, in the sense that the relation between the reader and the text is constrained by conventions and structures of authority that it is the critics b...