Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes

Critics have long puzzled over the apparent disparities in Cervantes’ complete works. How could the creator of the modern novel have published works as different as Don Quixote, Part II, and the posthumous Byzantine romance, the Persiles, less than a year apart? By placing all of Cervantes’ prose works in a chronological framework, the author shows that Cervantes’ opus can best be understood as process, revealing an inner evolution of style and genre, and, more suggestively, a personal, psychological unfolding as well. El Saffar finds that the relationship between the male and female characters is a crucial structuring factor in every work. Beyond Fiction underlines the importance of the emergence of the feminine figure to the chronology of Cervantes’ oeuvre and proposes a model for examining Western literature in general for signs, in their portrayal of the feminine, of the authors’ psychological development.