Forms of modernity:Don Quixote and modern theories of the novel

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schmidt Rachel Lynn
Published: University of Toronto Press,
Publisher Address: Toronto
Publication Dates: c2011.
Literature type: Book
Language: English
Series: University of Toronto romance series
Subjects:
Item Description: Don Quixote.
Carrier Form: xx, 403 p.: ; 24 cm.
ISBN: 9781442642515 (hbk.)
1442642513
Index Number: I551
CLC: I551.063
I106.4
Call Number: I106.4/S353
Contents: Includes bibliographical references (p. [347]-376) and index.
Don Quixote and the problem of modernity -- Arabesques and the modern novel : Friedrich Schlegel's interpretation of Don Quixote -- The emptiness of the arabesque : Georg Lukács's theory of the novel -- Ideas and forms : Hermann Cohen's novelistics -- The poetics of resuscitation : Unamuno's anti-novelistics -- Form foreshortened : Ortega y Gasset's mediations on Don Quixote -- Don Quixote in Bakhtin -- Revolutions and the novel.
"It's a critical cliché that Cervantes' Don Quixote is the first modern novel, but this distinction raises two fundamental questions. First, how does one define a novel? And second, what is the relationship between this genre and understandings of modernity? In Forms of Modernity, Rachel Schmidt examines how seminal theorists and philosophers have wrestled with the status of Cervantes' masterpiece as an 'exemplary novel', in turn contributing to the emergence of key concepts within genre theory.
Schmidt's discussion covers the views of well-known thinkers such as Friedrich Schlegel, José Ortega y Gasset, and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also the pivotal contributions of philosophers such as Hermann Cohen and Miguel de Unamuno. These theorists' examinations of Cervantes's fictional knight errant character point to an ever-shifting boundary between the real and the virtual. Drawing from both intellectual and literary history, Forms of Modernity richly explores the development of the categories and theories that we use today to analyze and understand novels."--pub. desc.