Don Quijote and the novel: critical valuation and the history of the genre

Abstract

The article discusses Don Quijote’s place in the history of the novel, discerning the terms that guided its election as a model for the praise and definition of the genre, while indicating the interpretative anachronisms involved in this process. The idea is that, even if Cervantes’ text did not present many of the intentions that would be attributed to it in later times, such interpretive anachronisms do not eliminate its central place in the history of the novel in the ways it would be thought and practiced in centuries to come. To support this proposition, the novel is theorized as a genre that is formally flexible, despite being guided by relatively stable structural principles, and conceptually vague, despite being guided by relatively stable distinctions between neighboring textual genres. This mixture of formal flexibility and robustness, and conceptual vagueness and specificity, allows the values ??and interests of the literary field to determine its history, as it is observed in the interface between concepts and practices. The article then analyzes how, within this interface, Don Quixote acquired relevance as it was situated as a model for “modern literature” and/or was appropriated in the defense of “realism”. At its conclusion, following recent propositions from authors such as Resina (2006), Moore (2013) and Pavel (2013), the article discusses some philological considerations against the interpretive excesses of those forms of praise in order to consolidate the proposition that those excesses do not mitigate the importance of Cervantes in the history of the genre – guided, as it was, by critique’s own values, and not by concerns with analytical rigor.