A Critical Introduction to Don Quixote

Designed as a ‘reading guide’, this book provides a three-tiered approach to the literary fabric of Cervantes’ masterpiece: story, narrators, characters, style and structure. Its three major divisions―The Exemplary Story, The Quixotic Fiction, The Mythical Don Quixote, trace and analyze episode by episode the hero’s transformation from a ‘clinical’ case of literary insanity and chivalric folly, through the artifice of interlocking fictions that sustain his rise to mock in Part I, to mythical status as redemptive hero of social satire in Part II.

L. A. Murillo is Professor of Spanish, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. A native of Pasadena, he served in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943-1945, earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and his doctorate at Harvard University in 1953. Besides his publications as specialist in Spanish literature of the Golden Age and on Cervantes, he has published translations of Jorge Luis Borges and The Cyclical Night, a study of irony in James Joyce and Borges.