This casebook gathers a collection of ambitious essays about both parts of the novel (1605 and 1615) and also provides a general introduction and a bibliography. The essays range from Ramón Menéndez Pidal's seminal study of how Cervantes dealt with chivalric literature to Erich Auerbachs polemical study of
Don Quixote
as essentially a comic book by studying its mixture of styles, and include Leo Spitzer's masterful probe into the essential ambiguity of the novel through minute linguistic analysis of Cervantes' prose. The book includes pieces by other major Cervantes scholars, such as Manuel Durán and Edward C. Riley, as well as younger scholars like Georgina Dopico Black. All these essays ultimately seek to discover that which is peculiarly Cervantean in
and why it is considered to be the first modern novel.