Beneath the Fiction

Cervantes's ‘Novelas ejemplares’ rival ‘Don Quijote’ in complexity and significance. This book analyzes all twelve ‘novelas’, seeking to illuminate the inherent tensions between the usually affirmative resolutions and lessons proposed by Cervantes's narrators, on the one hand, and the inescapable socio-cultural dissonances and ironies of story and language, on the other. This reading of the entire collection reveals the richness and complexity of many of the less-studied ‘novelas’ as well as the striking modernity (or postmodernity) of the final text.