This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership.
An extensive general Introduction places the Novelas in the context of Cervantes' life and work; provides basic information about their content, composition, internal ordering, publication, and critical reception, gives detailed consideration to the contemporary literary-theoretical issues implicit in the title, and outlines and contributes to the key critical debates on their variety, unity, exemplarity, and supposed 'hidden mystery'. After a series of chapters on the individual stories, the volume concludes with two survey essays devoted, respectively, to the understanding of eutrapelia implicit in the Novelas, and to the dynamics of the character pairing that is one of their salient features. Detailed plot summaries of each of the stories, and a Guide to Further Reading are supplied as appendices.
Stephen Boyd is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies of University College Cork.
1 Cervantes's Exemplary Prologue Stephen Boyd
2 Enchantment and Irony: Reading La gitanilla William Clamurro
3 The Play of Desire: El amante liberal and El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros Peter Dunn
4 Language as Object of Representaion in Rinconete y Cortadillo A K G Paterson
5 Now you see it, now you... see it again? The Dynamics of Doubling in La española inglesa I Torres
6 Soldiers and Satire in El licenciado Vidriera Stephen Rupp
8 Remorse, Retribution and Redemption in La fuerza de la sangre : Spanish and English Perspectives [with Trudi Darby] Barry Ife
8 Remorse, Retribution and Redemption in La fuerza de la sangre : Spanish and English Perspectives [with B. W. Ife] T L Darby
9 Free Thinking in El celoso extremeño Paul Lewis-Smith
10 Performances of Pastoral in La ilustre fregona: Games within the Game Gareth Walters
11 Cervantine Traits in La dos doncellas and La señora Cornelia Idoya Puig
12 The Peculiar Arrangement of El casamiento engañoso and El coloquio de los perros E.T. Aylward
13 Eutrapelia and Examplarity in the Novelas ejemplares Colin Thompson
14 `Entre parejas anda el juego'/`All a Matter of Pairs': Reflections on Some Characters in the Novelas ejemplares Jose Montero Reguera