Don Quixote or the Quest for Fiction in Spanish Golden Age Literature

The present study reflects on Cervantes's conception of fiction focusing particularly on his masterpiece, Don Quixote. The initiator of modern narrative fiction did not produce a systematic or theoretical piece of work that could be regarded as the authoritative declaration of his understanding of fiction. His literary premises and beliefs are scattered throughout his entire artistic creation conveyed by narrators, characters or fictive authors, who assume the authorial voice in the prologues to his works. In many respects, all these constitute a heterogeneous and even contradictory material, hard to systematize or to adjust into a coherent programmatic of his of conception of fiction. However, for a considerable section of the scholarship, Cervantes turns out to be a neo-Aristotelian, which contextualizes him in the theoretical background of the late Renaissance. A less numerous part of Cervantes's criticism, including my own perspective, questions the real adscription of Cervantes to neo-Aristotelianism. The reasons vary and differ. In these pages I focus on some of them, related to the emergence notion of fiction for the Spanish Golden Age, as well as the seminal contribution to the enthronement Of Don Quixote as the originator modern fiction for the Iberian and Western world. (מתוך המאמר‎(