Narrative of the Renaissance and Cervantes
Narrative Renaissance
The Renaissance world intended to reconcile the old and the new, to achieve its main function for the reader. Renaissance models include noble Byzantine adventures and pastoral novels.
Renaissance Models
Noble Byzantine Adventures
This subgenre attracted great Renaissance figures. Its adventures were related in exotic cities. These cities were more believable than those of the chivalric novel.
Pastoral Novel
Some shepherds in an idealized pastoral setting travel through space narrating their woes. It uses the principle of embedded stories. Dialogue acquires great importance, and almost all the characters transmit their stories through letters, songs, and poems.
Other Narrative Poems
The Celestinesque Novel
These texts follow the model of the tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, of an erotic character.
Sentimental Novel
These deal with the theme of misguided passions.
The Chivalric Novel and Moorish Novel
Lazarillo de Tormes
This is an anonymous work whose sources include the tale of the golden donkey, the fourth book of the brave knight Rinaldo de Montalbán, a collection of love letters, and folktales.
History
Lazarillo is forced to leave his family and serve several masters.
Parts
The Foreword
Justifies the story (why I write the story).
The Treatises
Modules of childhood (blind-Clergy-squire), adolescence (friar-buldero-another of Pandro’s paintings), youth (Capy-bailiff-archpriest). Lazarillo’s character is configured through the experiences he lives in a loveless world.
Address
It is structured as a letter written in the 1st person. The protagonist’s obedience is a monologue. There are 2 types of discourses: Appraisals and Situations of the characters; Universal.
Resources Used
Expressive resources, humor through certain passages of the Gospel, word games, diminutives, and antitheses to create irony.
Main Theme
Honor and anticlerical criticism.
Narrative of Cervantes
1) The Galatea
This first work shows traces of Renaissance training. It is a novel whose protagonists, idealized bucolic shepherds, express their loving feelings in a harmonious and unreal nature.
2) Exemplary Novels
A collection of twelve short stories in the Italian style of writing, which maintains the classical ideal of “teach and delight”.
The Gypsy Girl
Fantasy poetry built around the figure of Preciosa and her relationship with a young man capable of giving up his rank for love. Finally, he discovers that she is also of high lineage but had been kidnapped by a gypsy woman shortly after birth.
The Liberal Lover
A Byzantine novel of love and adventure with a happy ending thanks to the generosity of the protagonist, capable of delivering his fortune to free his beloved girlfriend, also a friend.
Rinconete and Cortadillo
A tale of two boys who live by cheating and deceit and enter a group of thugs who live off the scam, chaired by the frightening Monipodio, whose fights, cheating, and entertainment they witness.
The English-Spanish
Tells the process of love between a young Spanish woman who had been kidnapped by the British in the siege of Cadiz and the son of her adoptive parents, hidden Catholics. Eventually, the couple returned to their parents, and the young lovers are reunited.
The Licentiate Vidriera
Recounts the strange adventures of a student, Tomás Rodaja, who, after serving as a soldier in Italy, returned to continue his studies at Salamanca and went crazy for believing himself to be made of glass, while maintaining a strange lucidity and wit.
The Force of Blood
The rape of Leocadia by a young nobleman of Toledo and how, over time and after having had a child from that situation, she ends up marrying the rapist.
The Jealous Extremaduran
Develops the disappointment of an old Indian man who marries a fourteen-year-old girl. Even though he tries to save her in his prison-house by all means, she ends up being seduced by a boy.
The Illustrious Mop
Relates the process of love between a young nobleman and a beautiful mop, the supposed daughter of an innkeeper from Toledo, who is, indeed, of noble birth. Again, Cervantes is led here by his optimistic, idealized, and romantic vein.
The Two Maids
Narrates the adventures of two youths who, in male disguise (a widely used resource in novels and drama of the time), go after their love until they get married.
Mrs. Cornelia
Counts the fortunes of two Basque nobles in Italy who take charge of a young single mother. This one ends up marrying her lover, who happens to be the Duke of Milan.
The Fraudulent Marriage
It tells how a poor lieutenant, trying to lure a rich lady, is apparently abandoned by her after being infected with syphilis. From his hospital bed, he hears two dogs…
The Dialogue of the Dogs
Embedded within the previous novel, it is the transcript that the lieutenant makes of the conversation between two dogs that, gifted with speech, have committed deceit and chicanery by the masters they have served.
3) The work of Persiles and Sigismunda
A Byzantine novel that blends realism and idealism and the adventures of two lovers who, after a long and eventful journey through several countries, arrive in Rome, where they get married (the work referred to in the title are the shipwrecks, dangers, kidnappings, etc., that the characters go through).
4) Don Quixote de la Mancha (Alonso Quijano)
The work is published in two parts: the first (1605, with the title “The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha”) and the second (1615, with the title “The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha”).
Structure of the Work
Don Quixote is organized by developing a primary action in three outings: the first and second are recounted in the same part, and the third covers the entire second half.
Schedule
- Departure from the village: The first time he leaves his home alone, and the rest he will stay with his faithful squire Sancho Panza.
- Series of adventures: The knight’s adventures happen similarly.
- The third outing is a change: The protagonist is no longer mistaken but disfigures reality.
- Return to the village: The three outings conclude with Don Quixote’s return: the first two in harsh conditions and the last to die.
Characters
Don Quixote and Sancho are two distinct and complementary figures who become friends through dialogue.
Don Quixote
The character is described as tall and thin, old, angry, educated, a great reader, single, solitary, brave, and impulsive. His madness, the central theme of the play, leads him to become a knight. He wants and believes to be a knight-errant but knows he is pretending.
Sancho
Opposed to his master, Sancho is short and paunchy, prudent, illiterate, married, practical, and peaceful: a farmer who agrees to serve Don Quixote by the promised reward of an island.
Dulcinea
A fiction of Don Quixote, created from Aldonza Lorenzo, a strong and ugly peasant whom the hero has just seen and has never spoken to.
Themes and Meaning of the Work
The main themes are idealism, freedom, love, madness, and literature.
The Narration and Narrators of Don Quixote
Narrator Home
Account from a higher level and external to the story. It is omniscient and sometimes uses the first person.
Narrators-Characters
The main narrator gives the floor to the characters who have various kinds of stories in which they play different roles.